How much tax do I have to pay in Redmond, Washington form my Microsoft Research Internship income?
"An unmarried person with a total U.S.-sourced earned income under $ 37,000 during the year 2016 is likely to owe: If the original poster is not an ""independent contractor"", and is not ""billing corp-to-corp"" then: In summary: References:"
A desktop application that has the same features (although as already stated, nothing will be identical but if you are looking for functionality then certainly there will be) and pretty simple to use was Microsoft Money, however, Microsoft stopped supporting it with newer versions and while the existing versions will work, I still use mine, there will be no future updates. I like the interface, its simple to use and has all the features you want. They abandoned it in favor of Intuit's Quicken but personally I am not a fan of the Quicken interface. They still had a more extensive and probably too much for the average user application called Office Accounting, but they abandoned future updates and supports on that in favor of Intuit's Quickbooks. Again, I am not a fan of the interface but they are very feature rich including invoicing and payroll, again overkill for the average user. They still have the Small Business Accounting in the form of Microsoft Dynamics, but that is utterly overkill for personal use. I generally don't trust online or cloud based accounting solutions like Mint or even Quicken online because I don't trust my information security to some third party without knowing how they are securing it and what will happen to me if/when they are leaked due to breach. So I like to keep everything local to myself and that's a good move for you, you should do that. It seems at the moment the market standard without much competition is Quicken for personal use and Quickbooks for small business. I would recommend you start with Quicken and if your needs increase in the future, you can easily transfer into Quickbooks to scale up as they are fully compatible with each other. Check it out here and compare their products to see what works best for your needs. "I assume your employer does standard withholding?  Then what you need to do is figure what bracket that puts you in after you've done all your normal deductions.  Let's say it's 25%.  Then multiply your freelance income after business expenses, and that's your estimated tax, approximately.  (Unless the income causes you to jump a bracket.) To that you have to add approximately 12-13% Social Security/Medicare for income between the $90K and $118,500.  Filling out Form 1040SSE will give you a better estimate. But there is a ""safe harbor"" provision, in that if what you pay in estimated tax (and withholding) this year is at least as much as you owed last year, there's no penalty.  I've always done mine this way, dividing last year's tax by 4, since my income is quite variable, and I've never been able to make sense of the worksheets on the 1040-ES." If my salary slip says that I will be paying x INR tax this financial year. Then how much minimum investment I need to do to avoid any tax? This rebate is not directly linked to investments. If your total Gross is less than Rs 5 lacs, from the total tax computed, you can claim a rebate of upto Rs 5000. Does salary slip considers this rebate amount? This depends on the company policy. Companies may already factor in the rebate and deduct less tax. However it is important to claim this when you file the Returns, else it would show up as excess tax. There is no provision in the company form 16 to show this. Further if your taxable income becomes more than Rs 5 lacs, due to say other income, you will not be eligible for this rebate and have to pay tax. Do I have to explicitly specify this claim under 87A in my ITR? Yes you have to. If you company has already factored this while deducting tax you will not get any refunds. If the company has not factored this, you will have to claim refund. If above is true, and x is not calculated by considering this rebate amount, As indicated, this is not directly linked to investments. Will this increment of tax rebate from 2000INR to 5000INR will be applicable immediately  This is applicable for financial year 2016-2017 for which you would be filing returns in 2017. Edit: If you say Gross salary is say Rs 6 lacs. If you invest 1.5 lacs in 80C. Your Net taxable income is Rs 4.5 lacs. The tax on 4.5 lacs Normal individual less than 60 years will be 10% of 2 lacs. i.e. Rs 20,000. You can then claim Rs 5000 as deduction under 87A and pay only Rs 15,000 [20000-15000]. If your Gross salary is say Rs 2.8 lacs. You don't do any investments, your Net taxable income is Rs 2.8 lacs. The tax would be Rs 3000. You can claim rebate under 87A and not pay any tax. "You are not the only one with this problem. When Intuit changed their pricing and services structure in 2015 a lot of people got angry, facing larger fees and having to go through an annoying upgrade just to get the same functionality (such as Schedule D, capital gains). You have several options: (1) Forget Turbo Tax and just use paper forms. That is what I do. Paper is reliable. (2) Use forms mode in Turbo Tax. Of course, that may be even more complicated than simply filing out paper forms. (3) Use a different service. If your income is below $64,000 the IRS has a free electronic filing service. Other online vendors have full taxes services for less than Turbo Tax. (4) Add the amount to ordinary income. Technically, as long as you report the income, you cannot be penalized, so if you add the capital gain to your ordinary income, then you have paid taxes on the income. Even if they send you a letter, you can send an answer that you added it to ordinary income and that will satisfy them. Of course you pay a higher rate on your $26 if you do that. (5) If you are in the 15% or below income bracket you are exempt from capital gains, and you can omit it. Don't believe the nervous Nellies who say the IRS will burn your house down if you don't report $26 in capital gains. Penalties are assessed on the percentage of TAXES you did not pay (0.5% penalty per month). Since 0.5% of $0 is $0 your penalty is $0. The IRS knows this. The IRS does not send out assessment letters for $0. (6) Even if you are above the 15% bracket, there is likelihood it is still a no-tax situation (see 5 above). (7) Worst case scenario: you are making a million dollars per year and you omit your $26 capital gains from your return. The IRS will send you an assessment letter for about $10. You can then send them a separate check or money order to pay it. In all honesty I have omitted documented tax items, like taxable interest, that the IRS knows about many times and never gotten an assessment letter. Once I made a serious math error on my return and they sent me an assessment letter, which I just paid, end of story. And that was for a lot more than $26. The technical verbiage for something like this in IRS lingo is CP-2000, underreported income. As you can see from this official IRS web page, basically what they do is guess how much they think you owe and send you a bill. Then you pay it. If you do so in time, you don't even get a 0.5% interest penalty on your $6.75 owed or whatever it is. (8) Go hog wild. As long as you are risking an assessment on your $26, why not go hog wild and just let the IRS compute all your taxes for you? Make a copy of your income statements, then mail them to the IRS with a letter that says, ""Hi, I am Mr. Odinson, my SSN is XXX-XX-XXXX. My address is XYZ. I am unable to compute my taxes due to a confused state of mind. I am hereby requesting a tax assessment for the 2016 tax year."" Make sure you sign and date the letter. In all probability they will compute the full assessment and send you a bill (or refund)." "This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](http://www.epi.org/publication/the-high-road-seattle-labor-market-and-the-effects-of-the-minimum-wage-increase-data-limitations-and-methodological-problems-bias-new-analysis-of-seattles-minimum-wage-incr/) reduced by 97%. (I'm a bot) ***** &gt; Rather than a smooth distribution of workers at and above any statutory minimum wage, a regular feature of local, state, and federal minimum wages is that there are noticeably more workers who earn exactly any new minimum wage than there are just above the new minimum.  &gt; The fact that, in their Figure 1, the authors fail to detect any new spike due to the minimum wage increase to $13.00, again suggests that the study is not estimating the true effects of the minimum wage and instead merely reflecting wage growth in Seattle that is occurring regardless of the the minimum wage increase.  &gt; One reason the study may be finding strong employment gains well above any plausible range where the minimum wage could be having an effect on employment is that Seattle was experiencing a labor market boom at the same time the city was implementing the minimum wage increase.   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/6jrcx7/the_high_road_seattle_labor_market_and_the/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~153606 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **wage**^#1 **minimum**^#2 **employment**^#3 **Seattle**^#4 **increase**^#5" My question is what is the average income of those people who are driving into the core of the city for work. I am assuming that they probably make a much larger salary than $1.1k, though they are still getting screwed on transportation. "That sounds great, and don't get me wrong, I'm having fun and learning a lot at this internship, I don't regret accepting the offer in the slightest. The thing is, I also wanted to improve my ""technical"" skills (if that makes sense) over the summer, and right now I'm wondering where exactly to start. You mentioned coding and excel, is there anything specific that I should know, or a good place to start? I know some basics of C++, HTML and CSS, and some excel stuff like Vlookups, but nothing beyond that really. Is there any specific language I should learn, for example? Or something more advanced in excel? If I'm not at work, I'm sitting at my PC at home, so I feel like I should be doing *something*." Oh, well $100k AUD is a little on the high side but still fairly typical for an entry level EE.  EDIT: Turns out it's almost exactly what my starting salary was as an entry level ee back in 2001 after adjusting for inflation.