Sunday, August 23, 2009

Snork Maiden's Taxes 2008-9

I just completed Snork Maiden's tax return. As it is pretty straightforward and I have a spreadsheet set up from last year as well as last year's return to refer to it only took me 3/4 hour to do. See last year's figures for a comparison.



Last year's salary was much lower due to us only moving to Australia after the tax year started. Snork Maiden's non-salary income increased as her savings built up. Unfortunately, for the first time ever she owes money on her tax return :( I don't understand how this can be. 2/3 of the way through the year we started making salary sacrifice contributions to superannuation which should have lowered our total tax bill for the year. That means that tax should have been withheld at too high a rate for the first eight months of the year. I expected that to roughly cancel out with the tax due on investment income. But apparently her employer withheld too little tax all year.

Her average tax rate was 23.56%. Her marginal tax rate is 31.5%. This covers all taxes as there are no state income taxes in Australia.

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