It's Been a While, Time for an Update

I was just interviewed for an article about personal finance sites, and the brief early-morning chat reminded me that I haven't updated this blog in a while. I'd like to start writing regularly again, it's just tough to keep up with my blogs and my life. I don't know how some personal finance bloggers find the time to write, like, three posts a day.

That said, I know I left you all with that wonderful long health insurance rant cliffhanger. Cue the cheesy suspense music please... "Duhn, duhn, duhn"....

There's good news, and there's bad news. I still don't have health insurance. The good news is that's mostly because I'm lazy and less because I've been denied. Well, I haven't been denied because I haven't applied yet. I've been speaking with a health insurance agent who seems to think my best option is to lie on my applications, although he won't go on record as advising that. Meanwhile he's also helped me put together a quote for Pacific Healthcare where I don't have to lie, and that seems pretty reasonable (something like $140 a month for catastrophic insurance).

COBRA turns out to be a whopping $405 a month, so unless it turns out I actually get denied from every other option, it's looking like COBRA, an aptly named snake, is a type of insurance one ought to stay away from even though it's enticing from afar.

Money matters are looking up. I'm actually getting more work than I know what to do with right now. And old colleague who is the editor of a journalism-y startup just asked me to work a few hours for her a week helping with admin stuff, doing site maintenance and at some point writing some short and fun features for the site. I have a feeling she's going to try to encourage me to get back into writing longer-format features and news stories at some point, but I'm not sure that's the direction I want to head in. I'm kind of happy with the freedom (and better pay) that comes with controlling my career as a freelance writer out in Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, my journalism expertise is in technology writing, and if I'm going to work for any startup in the area, it's too conflict-of-interesty to try to swing a career half-time in journalism and half-time in writing marketing copy for these sites. This gig for my old colleague is kosher because it's covering a specific area of technology that I will not be doing writing work for. So, that seems alright.

My biggest concern at the moment is the upcoming tax season. I just hope I get my W2 and 109 forms my way early so I can start figuring out how many zillions of dollars I owe, or don't owe. I honestly have no idea what taxes will look like this year, and it scares me a bit. See, from Jan-June of 07 I was making "35k a year" and having taxes taken out of that. Then From June 15-Nov 15, I was making "50k a year" and taxes were swiped from my bi-monthly checks. That's good. But after that, my tax situation turns into a bit of a mess. I've done a bunch of freelancing here and there. Some of it was for $50, some for $600, some for $1000. Obviously I'll report all of the larger gigs, and try my best to remember the tally of my smaller gigs. Smart me, I haven't been keeping track of my checks as I cashed them at the bank because I just assumed I'd have access to the scan of them later. I could have sworn at one point I saw these scans on my BankofAmerica.com account. No such luck. Apparently they charge some fee to pull up the scans of old checks. I don't really want to find out how much that fee is. I guess I'll just wait for my tax mail to come, and take it from there. And hopefully, at least for this year, it will turn out that my average pay was so low (due to periods of unemployment, without being on unemployment) that I'll somehow break even on the whole tax situation. If not, there's a chance I could owe a lot.

This is also the first year I'm going to see what having some cash in a mutual fund does to my taxes. Apparently I have to pay tax on my dividends. But right now it looks like my mutual fund, despite being 'in the bank' for over seven months, has returned to its original buying price. So I'm not sure how that all works out come tax time. Can someone explain this to me?