Red hell and death and taxes

Well, I broke down and spent the morning investigating my tax situation, which was rather confused at the end of last year. After some burrowing, I found that TurboTax was surprisingly right after all. Scholarships and fellowships that are reported on Form 1098-T rather than Form W-2 count neither for "earned income credit" (on Schedule M) nor for IRA purposes.

As regards Schedule M, which covered 2009's "Making Work Pay" credit, the "Earned Income Worksheet" line 4a specifically subtracts scholarship income: so people who rely solely on fellowships for their income are not eligible for earned income credits.

Finding out eligibility for Roth IRAs took considerably more digging, because on some portions of the 1040A instruction sheet, it says that scholarships count as "earned income." If you look at Publication 590, it says under "What is compensation?" that "Scholarship and fellowship payments are compensation for IRA purposes only if shown in box 1 of Form W-2." You can only contribute to an IRA if you have a non-zero "compensation."

So there you have it. This is not official tax advice, but you should look at the linked forms and draw the same conclusions that both TurboTax and I did. I'm glad the situation is clearer now, though of course I wish our tax system weren't such a mess.

Tradeoffs everywhere

Among the benefits of being a grad student is the ability to do literature review in one's hot tub.

Among the drawbacks of being in Ann Arbor is waking up to find the ambient temperature outside to be 5 °F.

New hobby

Combining my love of sailing and English by chuckling delightedly whenever I hear people use nautically originated phrases in everyday speech:

• take aback
• square away
• give leeway
• jump ship
• stem to stern
• etc.

Return of the "pickup notice"

I have gotten one or two of these in the past. This time it was a lot less mysterious. Even though it had a legitimate non-bulk stamp on it, it was labeled with "enroll at www.feinfo.org" and had a sticker that told me to "CHOOSE [MY] GIFT." Among my choices were a "condo stay," an "iPod shuffle," and a "visa gift card." This one was also labeled with a copyright by "NETWORK DIRECT, INC" which is one of these bogus advertising companies. I've heard about these "just show up to a meeting and you'll get a prize" before. They've been around for decades, and you have to resist a salesman's insistent pushes for an hour or more. That doesn't sound pleasant, and I imagine that if it were too good to be true, it probably would be.

Apricots

I picked one off of the tree in the yard here. It was tasty, but then an earwig fell out of it.

Happy Aprilday

I definitely had fun with this combined with a Perl script that continually cycled it producing flashing error messages (ERROR: I am lonely, give me paper, and love) etc.

Oops

I completely forgot to wish everyone a happy pi day, and to tell you all to "beware the ides of march!"

Today I made homemade ice cream. Yum.

And I learned yesterday another incredible way of increasing my sugar intake. Buy sugar cubes, saturate them with lime juice, and pop them in your mouth before they fall apart. <3 This is most delicious and sugar-tastic.