Rosie the Riveter's $15,000 Tax Bill and Why We All Miss Jerry

On Thursdays, I do taxes at a place called Locust Grove, the old Samuel Morse estate. (You loved his telegraph! Now thrill to his neo-Italianiate mansion with typical Hudson Valley porch frippery.)

The original mansion looked like this:



We don’t actually work in the mansion itself, which is drafty and unheated and infested with black mold, and moreover is fitted out with hideous 1930s furniture left over from the occupation of an Annette Innis Young, offspring of the couple who purchased the property from Morse, and who resided in the mansion, Miss-Haversham-like, until the early 1980s.

Her heirs had the choice of donating the property to the New York Park Department or selling it to Walmart to be used as a site for a new Sam’s Club.

They would have razed the mansion, of course. So, I guess you could say the heirs made the honorable choice.

At one time, there were dozens of these grand mansions, perched between the Hudson and the old Post Road (now Route 9.) In fact, Locust Grove is only 20 miles away, as the crow flies, from my favorite wreck of all time, the ruinous Wyndcliffe, where the novelist Edith Wharton was forced to spend her summers as a girl, thereby engendering in her a deep and lifelong hatred of all things Gothic:





(This was another year when I didn’t make it to Wyndcliffe. So these two pix are not mine. Wyndcliffe is easiest to find in the winter—during the summer and fall, it is quite swallowed up in the dense forest. But I really don’t like hiking about in the cold.)

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The TaxBwanas work in the visitor center, which is a pleasant enough building though also unheated. I cut the fingers off Dollar Store gloves and wear them, which makes me feel like a Dickens heroine.

My first client of the day was a pleasant young man around RTT’s age who was trying to hide from Da Taxman that he’d worked in NYC last year. NYC charges hefty local taxes! I just laughed and did my best for him. Got him out with a hefty refund from the Feds, which more than offset what he owed to the City and the state.

My second client of the day was Rosie the Riveter after automation has come to the factory. She got laid off from her job at IBM two years ago. Whatever its faults, IBM pays its ancillary staff quite handsomely, and there’s no chance whatsoever that she’ll ever get a job that pays that well again.

Last year, she worked at four separate jobs in a desperate scramble to make the monthly nut.

She wasn’t able to—and so, began siphoning monthly amounts out from the 401(k) that IBM had set up for her as part of her benefit package.

She couldn’t borrow against it because though she worked four jobs, she wasn’t employed at any of them on a full-time basis.

She buried her head in the sand and stopped keeping track of the amounts she was taking from the 401(k).

Not only are you taxed on premature withdrawals from retirement accounts, you are also hit with a hefty 10% surcharge. That surcharge can be waived under certain circumstances, but “hardship” is not one of those circumstances.

I added up her monthly debits; they came to $65,000. Which left her with a $15,000 tax bill.

When I told her, all the color drained out of her face.

Literally!

You read about this in Victorian fiction, but I think it was the first time I’d ever seen it.

I thought she might stroke out.

Then she began to weep.

So I did a very unprofessional thing: I hugged her.

“You will get through this,” I promised her. “You did what you thought you had to do. And it sucks that you thought you had to do it because unfortunately, there are consequences. But you will get through it.”

I speak from experience!

I was literally ←thisclose→ to being homeless at one point in Ithaca after my business collapsed and my husband abandoned me.

But, hey!

I turned it around (with some help from kind people), and am now scrambling up the rungs of middle class respectability with a credit score that just grows more awesome every month.

And if I can do it, anyone can do it.

I gave her all the numbers she needed. Call the IRS. Call New York State. Do not try to do this online! Even if you’re put on hold for three hours, stay the course because you need to speak with a real live human being!

Unfortunately, she snagged a full-time job in December, which means she’s unlikely to qualify for the IRS’s hardship write-off, but I gave her that info anyway.

I felt just terrible for her.

She’d made the mistake of trying to keep up a middle class lifestyle when she simply couldn’t afford to keep up a middle class lifestyle.

I couldn’t fault her for her pride.

It was probably all that had kept her going in that humiliating period after she’d lost her livelihood, and it must have seemed to her that all she’d ever be again was deadweight against the GNP’s relentless upwards trajectory.

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In the afternoon, Hewitt wandered by.

I sat at a table with him and Chuck, the former banker who’s devoting his retirement to Good Works and who is the nicest guy in the world.

I told Hewitt and Chuck all about the poor woman with the $15,000 tax bill.

Hewitt shook his head. “Never, ever make premature withdrawals from a retirement account. That’s when it’s time to max out your credit cards. Credit card companies write off debt all the time.”

“Right. But the IRS counts written-off credit card debt as income,” I said.

“True,” Hewitt said, “but you won’t have to deal with that 10% surcharge. That’s the killer.”

Hewitt is very male and jolly and uncomplicated. Smart but not in the slightest intellectual.

This has a certain appeal to Angst Queen me.

The three of us shot the shit for a bit about the bad old days at Poughkeepsie Plaza where our site coordinator Jerry, a former IRS fraud investigator who used to bust Columbian coke dealers and crooked politicians, played fast and loose with tax codes to find clients like Rosie the Riveter loopholes.

We all miss Jerry.

“Let’s have lunch!” Hewitt boomed, and I rather thought the invitation was aimed specifically at me. Though I could have been mistaken.

But I am feeling tentative right now. Illness aftermath and this strange floating sense of apprehension.

So I let the guys go off alone.