Posted on 01/02/2014 9:11:56 AM PST by Kaslin
What will your typical paycheck look like in 2014 after Uncle Sam's G-men have gotten their dirty, stinking ape paws all over it?
Obviously, the answer to the question of how much of your income will be left over for you after the federal government has snatched a good part it depends upon quite a lot. How much income will you make? How many withholding allowances have you set up with your employer on your IRS Form W-4? How much pre-tax contributions will you be making toward your retirement plan or your health care or dependent care flexible spending accounts? What if you get a raise?
Our tool below is designed to answer those questions for 95% of all Americans. You just need enter the indicated information as it applies for you, and we'll do our best to estimate how much of the money you work hard to earn will still be yours after the federal government has withheld what it wants from your paycheck!
But really, it's not necessarily as quite as simple as that, which is something that we'll discuss in more detail below the tool....
Now that we've given you a sense of how much money you'll have withheld from each of your paychecks in 2014 by the U.S. federal government, we should note that there are some really complicating factors that may come into play during the year depending upon how much you earn.
For example, in 2014, once you have earned over $117,000, you will no longer have the Social Security payroll tax of 6.2% of your income deducted from your paycheck. But then, by the time that happens, you'll have long been paying taxes on your income that are taxed at rates that are at least 10% higher than those paid by over half of all Americans.
There's also the complication provided by the so-called "Additional Medicare Tax" that your employer is required to begin withholding from your paycheck if, and as soon as, your year-to-date income rises above the $200,000 mark, which is part of the new income taxes imposed by the "Affordable Care Act" (a.k.a. "Obamacare"). Since the money collected through this 0.9% surtax on your income does not go to directly support the Medicare program, unlike the real Medicare payroll taxes paid by you and your employer, it is really best thought of as an additional income tax.
Since we've already mentioned "Obamacare", we should also note that many Americans may soon find themselves in the situation where they find that they have an additional income tax liability in 2014 because of the Affordable Care Act. At this writing, Americans who do not have health insurance coverage and who have not been included among those groups qualifying for hardship exemptions under the law are at risk of a nasty tax surprise, even if their situation comes about through no fault of their own thanks to the law's extremely careless construction and implementation. We'll address that potential additional tax liability soon....
There are other paycheck calculators like this on the Internet, including the very well done tools available at PaycheckCity.com. We really like PaycheckCity's calculators because they allow you to determine the amount of state income tax withholding that will be taken out of your paycheck separately from what the federal government takes.
Then again, if you live in one of the nine states that have no personal income tax for wage and salary income (Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington or Wyoming), our tool above will provide you with a very good estimate of your actual take-home pay. We'll note that both New Hampshire and Tennessee both tax dividend and interest income, which doesn't affect your paycheck, but might influence your withholding decisions.
We've been in the business of calculating people's paychecks (not including state income tax withholding) since 2005!
You have control over only a part of your earnings. The government has control over the rest. We are under communism-lite.
Try living on less than $15,000 a year. Home & all vehicles are paid for. But there is never anything extra to have a cushion for car repairs, etc.
I don’t have a paycheck any more. I am self employed. I have chosen to work part time and earn less money right now. It’s better for my family. Our household income is staying ok, but the taxes took a bigger bite in 2013, and health insurance also went up a lot. We are adjusting our living expenses down.
2013 was smaller than 2012 was smaller that 2011. I suspect the pattern will continue, since the longer the mythical recovery is, the worse things get. Things won’t get better until we impeach POS and throw a bunch of politicians in prison.
Who will buy our debt if the FED doesn't? At what interest rate? I find it fascinating that NO ONE is discussing the fact that NO BONDS are bought by other countries. We are floating our own debt and no one seems frightened. If we were Argentina, or Spain, the world would be a buzz. How long will business be forced to run from ObamaCare? How will the US adjust to two 29 hour part time jobs making $10 an hour from 1 40 hr job making $25 an hour? All these questions are still out there waiting to be answered. At some point, we all know that the socialist utopia will fail,.....badly. Will it be political or bloodshed? How long will the steam pot boil before critical mass? Who would make long term plans with all this nervousness in the mix? At least as the US declines into the abyss, we will finally have gay marriage as we starve, freezing in the dark./sarc
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