My DH is unusual dilemma. He gets 16 days/year vacation, 4 floating holidays, and 1 week (5 days) of unpaid leave available a year. This is on top of unlimited sick days. It’s a lot of vacation. The sick days really are for sick days and no one abuses it because they want to keep their jobs and it’s harder to come back and catch up.
But the dilemma is, every year, my DH is not given the option of taking the unpaid leave. The company instead deducts a week’s pay pre-tax off his salary assuming that he will take the leave. And at the end of the year they pay it back to him if he doesn’t take it. That’s okay.
Also he is only allowed to rollover 1 week (5 days) of vacation a year, so it’s use it or lose it. Floating holidays must be used in the year they are accrued as well. So what’s the dilemma?
I realized as I was budgeting, that again this year, my DH will get a larger first paycheck in 2009 and it will count as 2009 income instead of 2008. It’s a nice bonus, but I wish the company wouldn’t get an interest free loan on the money. Also it slightly affects our taxes, and I should have recaculated the salary without a week. Plus my DH is paid biweekly but a week behind, so that means our income for the year is off as well.
Does this happen to anyone else? How do you deal with being behind on being paid? Or with not being paid because it’s assumed you’ll take vacation?
2 responses so far ↓
1 Pearl // Nov 30, 2008 at 12:21 pm
If it’s really important, you can do a modified form of accrual accounting for yourself. I use Quicken and even though most of my accounting is on a cash basis, I have “General Receivables” and “General Payables” accounts to which I post things like income taxes paid in one year that are for a previous year’s taxes, or loans made to family members, or purchases on “deferred payment” schedules.
But in your case, if the salary for the unpaid leave is being paid and reported in a different tax year, why would you want your own records of your year’s income to be different from what would be reported to the IRS? That seems like unnecessary complexity.
2 LAL // Nov 30, 2008 at 12:35 pm
It changes my numbers I use to run my tax payments for the year. I hadn’t counted it. I should have more carefully examined the numbers. I will try to get closer next year.
I think I might be due a refund again. Last year it was $5k because I was off for other reasons.
I just can’t get the taxes correct.
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