I'm A Super.com

Disclaimer: This is independent research. Check with someone smarter than me before going and screwing up your life.

Remember how our paychecks suddenly got a little heavier, as our federal taxes decreased?

The reason for that is that President Obama’s first stimulus act (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) included a $400 tax credit (Making Work Pay Credit) for the 2009 tax year. Unlike a lot of tax credit’s we see however, this one was included at the employer level, paid out over the year in the form of tax deductions. In other words, you’re getting a $400 tax credit, but rather than take it off your 2009 tax bill, they’re giving it back by giving you more of your withholding money.

However, it was a poorly planned tax credit. Unfortunately, in a variety of circumstances, average-joe families may have several hundred dollars in money they’ll need to take out of their 2009 refund, or worse yet, if they usually break even, they’ll end up owing it back.

Situations in which you may be overpaid (Consumerist, CNN, other):

• Anyone who holds more than one job
  • You will get paid the Making Work Pay Credit twice, up to $400 ($800 for a joint filer) from your first employer and up to $400 ($800 for a joint filer) from your second employer
• Joint filers whose spouses work
  • Each spouse will end up being paid the credit for married couples by each of their employers. There’s a twist, too. Because of the way the withholding tables were set up, each working spouse may be paid up to $600 this year – instead of up to the $800, Mezistrano said. In other words, the husband would receive $600 at his job and the wife $600 at her job, for a total of $1,200. Since they’re only entitled to $800 total as a couple, that means they would have to pay $400 back to the IRS – or see their refund reduced by that amount
• Anyone who receives income from a rental property or investment, such as interest and dividends.
  • Your employer only knows about the income you earn at the company. If you receive other income that increases your modified adjusted gross income – or even pushes you past the income limits for the credit – you may end up owing the IRS some or all of the credit you received in your paycheck
• The credit phases out for couples who file jointly and have adjusted gross income between $150,000 and $190,000. So if one of you is getting it withheld, you’ll just end up owing it back at the end of that year, because you never actually qualified to receive it
• Anyone who started receiving their credit at the end of Febuary or anytime in March.
  • The withholding tables are structured so that payments starting in April will add up to $400 for single filers and $800 for joint filers by year end. If payments start sooner than that a tax filer may actually receive a bit more than he’s due by Dec. 31 Conversely, if your employer doesn’t start your payments until the end of April or in May – there’s no penalty if an employer doesn’t meet the April 1 deadline – you may end up getting a little less of a credit than you’re entitled to, in which case you can claim the rest when you file your 2009 tax return

• If anyone is like me, there could also be in trouble (maybe). Last year, before this tax credit, I made a change in my withholding, claiming many more dependents than I actually had to help get a more accurate withholding scheme. Getting more money in my check each money, while still withholding enough to not owe the IRS anything. This is recommended by the IRS. Unfortunately, once this tax-credit is applied, my withholding is so low that I still may not actually meet my 2009 tax withholding obligation. If I don’t change my withholding to withhold more money, I could potentially end up owing money to the IRS for the first time at the end of this year.

http://dontmesswithtaxes.typepad.com/dont_mess_with_taxes/2009/03/making-work-pay-withholding-considerations.html

http://consumerist.com/5192031/good-news-you-got-a-tax-cut-bad-news-you-might-want-to-adjust-your-withholding

The NBA is apparently in need of a $175 million dollar loan. Essentially a bailout from Bank of America and JP Morgan, which in turn were bailed out by US Taxpayer funds.

http://www.breitbart.com/
The National Basketball Association will borrow 175 million dollars to serve as aid to teams that might struggle in the weak global economy, Sports Business Journal reported Thursday…

Half of the league’s 30 teams agreed there was a need to go through with the borrowing, according to the report…

That’s fantastic.  Apparently even major league sports are really hurting in this tough economic times.

Gosh! If only there were a way to cut back some of the spending from this crucial organization. Maybe like, oh I don’t know, work over some of their salaries?

The NBA Spends over 2.1 BILLION Dollars a year a salaries alone!

The League Minimum Salary for the Calendar year 2008 was $412,718 per year. And few players are making the NBA’s minimum wage.

The top 30 highest paid players in the NBA make over 14 million dollars a year. Kevin Garnett from Boston ringing in at number 1 with a $24,750,000  salary. At the bottom of the top 30 is Lebron James with a yearly salary of $14,410,581.

The New York Knicks spend almost $100 Million dollars a year on salaries alone. And that’s just one of 30 teams!

You know, sports has it’s place in the world. But this is disgusting.

SalariesSource: HoopsHype

The semi-comprehensive e-mail I wrote to Intuit explains why TurboTax caused me some difficulty this year. Rather than detail it out, I figured I might as well just share the e-mail I wrote:

Intuit,

I need your help correcting my recent experience as a 6 year customer of TurboTax. I recently filed my 2008  State and Federal Tax Returns using TurboTax Deluxe Online. My taxes aren’t the most complicated, but I find that TurboTax has always been helpful in organizing my financial thoughts, and making sure I’m taking advantage of the latest deductions.

This year, my E-Filing was successful without any difficulty. I received a notification that my Federal return had been accepted by the IRS the same day I completed my filing (02/17/2009). A day later, I received an e-mail from TurboTax indicating that my 2008 State return was accepted, but that an “Extra Form” was required.

The e-mail indicated that I needed to send in an “extra Form” via mail to my state. The E-mail made no indication of which form to file, nor where to send it. The E-mail simply said I could find the form amongst the papers that TurboTax printed for me.

No such form, or instructions exist in the printed documents, or the PDF. I re-downloaded my return from TurboTax.com to be sure.

Once I was sure that no additional forms or instructions could be found, I used the TurboTax support site to get an Incident number (xxxxxxxx) and a phone number to call. I spoke with a representative who spent exactly 25 minutes speaking with her supervisor about navigating help on the TurboTax Website. At the end of the call, she indicated that perhaps there was a bug in the TurboTax software, but she isn’t sure. She told me that I should call the State Tax commission myself, and review my documents with them to make sure the Form TurboTax has told me I need to fill out, isn’t missing.

I currently have no confidence that the Turbo Tax STATE product has properly filled out my tax information. TurboTax has told me that I am missing forms which NEED to be submitted to my state, but TurboTax is unable to tell me what forms I must fill out, or where to send them. I have spent the last 2 1/2 hours working with the State tax commission’s forms and website, as well as other state tax payers to determine what forms I may or may not be missing.

I am requesting a full refund for the TurboTax State Product, which according to my order is $26.97 after tax. I am not requesting a refund for the TurboTax Federal product, as it has so far proven to be accurate and satisfactory.

I look forward to your response.

XXXXXXXXX

What’s really funny about this is that the phone call, which I didn’t feel I need to berate in the above email, was absolutely awful. It’s actually a lot worse than the e-mail let’s on. She points me to several forms that could be the culprit, all of which the state forms clearly say “Don’t fill this out unless you’re a millionaire disabled leper on welfare”. Needless to say, that’s not me.

Naturally, knowing the phone call was going to be golden, I recorded it. if there is any interest I’ll see about “beeping” out the personal information and posting it on the website.

Update (2:03 PM MST, 02/20/2009):

TurboTax responded to my e-mail today, nearly 48 hours after I originally sent it. The e-mail contained this:

Dear XXXXXXX,

Thank you for contacting TurboTax Customer Service & Support.

I understand that you will like a refund for the state product. I will need you to call so, Turbo Tax can confirm information over the phone. I do apologize for the inconvenience.

You may receive a survey from us through e-mail in approximately 24 hours asking you about my performance on today’s contact, as well as comments you may have in regards to the TurboTax product. So we can continue with our promise to provide our customers with the best support available, please take a few minutes to complete the survey.

Respectfully,

XX_XXXXX

 

So, apparently after waiting two days for my personalized e-mail response, I need to call in and get my issue taken care of. What number do I call?

Turns out, in order to get a support number you have to go to turbotax.com and fill out a brief support ticket to get the phone number. Shame I didn’t write it down the last time I called.

I called and after 15 minutes of holding, a nice lady (surely based in India, unlike the last one) spent another 15 minutes conferring with her supervisor (about what, I don’t know… there was no discussion of why I was requesting a refund) and finally issued me a confirmation number.

Sweet victory. After only over an hours worth of phone-call holding, and 2 1/2 hours of State tax form research, I have $26.20 on my way back. I’m not sure what happened to the other $0.77 in my refund… but I wasn’t going to argue.

Have you, as an ordinary Joe, ever wondered how much money all of those web site advertisements make?

Well, today is your lucky day! I’m here to share with you my very first paycheck for all of my so-called hard, web-based, work.

I’m going to make it quite simple:

So, after almost a full 3 years of having a Google Adsense account, I have finally received my first check. What wil I do with my $390.88? I have no idea.

Now to be fair, I haven’t had ads on on all of my sites for that 3 years. In addition to that, I haven’t exactly had the largest flow of traffic ever. I appear to be averaging around 15,000 hits a month at the moment. However, that’s continually growing as I continue to release new web-based tools and sites. So, not too bad. At best, it has about covered my hosting bill for the last 3 years.

So, now you know. At this rate, I really don’t think that many people are getting rich off of blogging and web-based applications, but I can see why it would be a few dollars of extra spending money every once in a while.

How popular is that radio station?

Maybe I am the only person that ever thinks about stuff like this, but I’ve often wondered “How does a radio station know how popular it is”? How do they know how many people are listening? How do they know how much to charge advertisers, and how do they convince advertisers that they’ll reach as many people as they’re claiming?

I’ve wondered this for years until this evening, when I finally had time to do a little search.

It turns out, radio stations get their marketing data from a couple of different companies, the largest and most popular of which is Arbitron, a Public company traded on the NYSE. They collect rating and market data, and then, you guessed it, sell it.

But how do they collect the data?

Yes, that’s definitely the question I’ve always wanted to know. How the crap does the radio station know how many people are listening? I have to admit I’m a bit of a technology fan and always have been (If you haven’t guessed) and I could conceive of no technological way in which I found it feasible to monitor an entire market using existing radio technology.

Turns out, this life-long question ends in a very underwhelming way: A small sampling survey. Yes, the way they’ve been collecting data for years has been:

Selecting a random sample of a population in roughly 100 metros throughout the United States four times a year. An additional 200 markets are surveyed in the Spring and Fall. People in the sample are asked to maintain a written diary describing each radio program listened to. Each selected household agreeing to participate is provided a diary for each member aged 12 and older… A new random sample is selected weekly…

In my heart I’ve always known this was really the only way they could have done it, but finding out seemed to break my heart all the same. It must get cooler. It must! Does it?

Are there cooler, more awesome ways? YES!

So it turns out Arbitron has done what you probably thought would have been pretty bad-A to begin with. They created a little device called the PPM, or Portable People Meter. This hardcore piece of equipment is about the size of an oldschool pager. Its electronic ear literally listens and picks up inaudible data encoded into your audio, identifying the radio station you’re listening to. You wear this baby for a year (yes, apparently they do compensate participants. I wonder how much?) and then turn it back in. How hot is that? That’s just plain cool.

You need to be a rocket scientist to interpret Arbitron data

All good things come to a dissapointing end when you find out two things:

1. You can view the radio station data online for free (here)

2. The data is so difficult to interpret, they teach courses on it

What Is AQH Share?

Average Quarter-Hour Persons (AQH Persons)
The average number of persons listening to a particular station for at least five minutes during a 15-minute period.

Share
The percentage of those listening to radio in the Metro who are listening to a particular radio station.
[AQH Persons to a Station / AQH Persons to All Stations] x 100 = Share (%)

Looking at my local market, I still see things like SP06, SU06… and so on, and I have NO idea what the heck all that means.

What have we learned from all this?

I think of stupid stuff while driving in the car, or sitting in the bathroom, or daydreaming at work.

What’s your favorite “Potty Question”?

Potty questions is defined as: A question no sane person would ever consider except when given a ridiculous amount of ‘free-time’ in which they’re not able to freely do anything but, uh, sit and think. (More Potty questions)