Yours portly has spent the last two nights laboring over income tax returns for Dr. Wife and myself. My taxes are always a bit unusual because I have so many side hustles (and 1099s as a result), but getting married in late 2025 changed quite a bit. Apparently, the State of South Carolina treats all income reported on the federal tax return as income due to the State, but you can claw it back to avoid double taxation (which is unconstitutional) by pulling the AGI from another State’s return (in this case, Dr. Wife’s earnings were entirely in North Carolina). I was shocked to learn that North Carolina has a lower State income tax than South Carolina, especially as we’re the allegedly more conservative of the two Carolinas. Yeesh!
Quick note: do not take any of the above as financial or tax advice. I’m not even sure if I’m explaining all of that correctly (to my younger brother: don’t panic—I did everything by the book, I just can’t remember every little exact detail at the time of writing, and don’t feel like looking it all up again, but I did it correctly).
As per usual, filling out tax forms reminds me of how much I despise the income tax, in part because it demands that we reveal so much of ourselves to the federal government. Like with so many things, though, we reveal intimate details about our lives—like how big our home office is—so we can grasp onto a few more of our own dollars. At this point, we should do away with all deductions and just charge everyone a flat 5% of their income—or, better yet, abolish the income tax and shift to a flat national sales tax. It’s way easier to control my spending than to try to calculate what percentage of my cell phone usage was for business purposes.
It’s also frustrating to hustle and scrimp and save all year, only to be punished for it come tax day (and, yes, I should start paying taxes quarterly—that’s coming under the new Dr. Wife/Portly regime).
But I digress. Dr. Wife and I will owe a good bit to the feds and to South Carolina, but she’ll get a bit of a refund in North Carolina, as my self-employment tax isn’t creating a tax liability in North Carolina. The timing, however, is providential, as my old house—praise the Lord!—is finally closing today.
Apparently, the buyer just can’t get her act together. She was supposed to close yesterday afternoon, but now is closing at 12:30 PM today. I have to e-sign another ALTA statement to get the payout from the house (an event that is blessedly not taxable—hurray!), so I’m waiting for the harried paralegal to send me the link (I called her when I didn’t see the e-sign link she promised to send “in a few minutes,” and she told me she’d gotten caught up in a “disastrous closing this morning”—gulp! Hopefully she’s not going to be telling some other sap the same thing about my closing.
That said, I’ll be able to use the proceeds from house to cover our tax bill and to create a bit of cushion for us financially until Dr. Wife completes residency later this year. Her house is also under contract—again, praise the Lord!—so we’ll soon go from living the three house, one apartment lifestyle to just having a house (with a hefty mortgage) and her temporary accommodations in North Carolina.
Shew! In other news, the koi are doing well; I’ll write up a koi update soon (and stay tuned for Friday—I’ll share a video of the fish frolicking about). I haven’t seen the rosy red minnows in awhile, so I suspect the koi ate them—ha! I’m going to pick up some more today to try to get those little cleaners back into the pond.
Happy Wednesday!
—TPP