Why must W4s be so freakin' complicated? I swear, I just don't understand the concept of allowances (they are too abstracted from dollar amount for my brain) and make it needlessly hard for me to say how much I want taken out of a paycheck to get as close to a $0 tax refund as possible.
For the last few years, what we have done is calculate roughly what we think our tax bill will be for the year, figure out how much per paycheck we would need to withhold to hit that number, then honestly we put in a total shot in the dark guess for allowances/extra to withhold on the w4 and wait 2 weeks to see what the impact was on our paycheck. Depending on how close or far away it was from what we need to withhold, we recalculate everything based on what we just paid, and finally retry with a new w4 entry... and the cycle goes like this for weeks. All of this stupid effort and back and forth to try and get the w4 correct! And then federal and state is different, and it's just a giant, annoying headache. For 2017, even with all my hard work trying to get the withholding correct, we still owe $900 in state taxes, so obviously we're still significantly missing the mark. Makes me want to tear my hair out!! Ugh!
There HAS to be an easier way to do this rather than my method. Does anyone have any tips to share on getting your state and fed tax w4 withholding as accurate as possible? The IRS withholding calculator looks to be offline until next month, but really, that only helps me figure out how many allowances to claim, but that doesn't smoothly translate to an accurate dollar amount to get as close to my tax burden as possible, kwim?