No Roth deductions. Healthcare is $311.25/mo for son and myself. Spouse has healthcare paid through work.
My pension contribution is 9.78% of my salary ($61k)
State income taxes aren't cheap in Nebraska.
Are we doing something wrong in terms of deductions?
I'm trying to understand where your money is going.
Your comment here:
We only have access to 1 457 account. Both employers offer 1 403b account. The $6k in the 457 account is the highest amount we can do while still paying the $585 mortgage.
Doesn't seem at all to match the math behind your actual stated numbers. Updating some of my previous post:
Starting: $115k income.
- Max out 403bs ($36k)
- Max out 457 ($18k)
Leaves you with about 61k income less the FICA taxes, which are about 8.3k. Healthcare looks like about 3.7k. Pension contributions are another 6k.
Now you've got $43k in income after all these. Given that all of this except FICA is pre-tax you're looking at only a few thousand in actual income taxes, with a kid and married filing jointly and crazy low AGI. Guesstimating here you guys owe around $3-4k total income taxes between NE/federal after deductions.
That's still way over $2.2k takehome a month (about $3250), even with much higher deductions than you currently have - and my example uses maxed out 457 too - so I don't really understand that you can only contribute $6k/year to the 457 while paying the mortgage.
I'm still not sure how this breaks down for you to have such minimal takehome pay.
Something in your numbers still doesn't make sense to me, unless your spending is much higher than your state $2.2k a month, and you are using the "we can only pay the minimum mortgage payment because our actual spending is much higher than our budgeted spending." But you specifically say that your take home is only $2.6k (with a lot lower deductions than I used, since you're only doing $6k in the 457 instead of $18k) and that you don't have a significant tax return anytime.
State income taxes aren't cheap in Nebraska.
If you max out all these accounts you guys will owe less than $2k worth of Nebraska income taxes, while making $115k. That's cheap to me.