I have never owed, thank god. I have always entered a 1 on my W-4 resulting in overpayment of income tax, and I've never had a reportable chunk of other income that I needed to pay taxes on.
My mom is gonna owe thousands because she had to withdraw on her retirement early to help my little brother. He's just got sentenced to 3 years in prison, but before his trial she bailed him out so he could spend xmas with his son, and she hired an attorney. He was looking at up to 10 years, so I guess the attorney helped?
He's FUCKED. Seriously fucked. They say he should get paroled after 18 mos, but the financial hole is going to be outrageous. He has to pay huge amounts to the state every month for years after he gets out. My mom spelled it all out for me and it just sounds impossible. No wonder people can't get out of the system. I guess the moral of the story is: DON'T GET IN TROUBLE. I'm so grateful that I managed to get away with everything. I can't tell you how many times I had a 20 year sentence in my purse.
He got his third DUI. In Texas. If you've ever been to Texas, there's signs everywhere warning people that the penalties for DUI are no joke there. I just can't believe he did it THREE times.
duis are bad everywhere but yeah i imagine texas is pretty harsh. my brother got one a couple years back and only recently truly recovered from it, in terms of finances
I think with his first one he got a fine that was in the thousands, had to take some classes, and then had to pay hundreds of dollars a month for probation (on top of the fine). I think the second one was just multiplying everything from the first one. The third one is mandatory prison time.
One of the signs you see on all the highways is 'DUI - You can't afford it'
I just don't know how anyone of average means could possibly keep up with it all, and if you get too far behind you just go back to jail. It's like there's no light at the end of the tunnel, hence no incentive to get on the right path. I don't know what to think of it.
yeah once you go under it's hard to pull yourself back up
it's hard to know what you'd replace it with though, you can't let crimes go unpunished, that just won't fly politically
it's a big problem, especially in the us. like in most countries you can just take public transport if you lose your license. if you live anywhere remotely rural here you're fucked