Depends on where you see yourself in the corporate ladder.

Do you want to keep a decent job and enjoy your free time? Stay where you are. Enjoy the drama of the senior management you get to learn about.

Do you want to climb the ladder? Look for a job that matches your wants and needs. Or talk to your boss. Maybe he/she supports you in finding a role with more responsibility inside the same company.

From my experience i can tell you it's easier to climb the ladder upwards instead of downwards when you're priorities might have shifted.

This likely contributed to the issue and is so easily overlooked. I hate how easily it is to fuck yourself in our tax system. It's probably worth paying a CPA to verify just for this year for peace of mind alone.

He means $200k and $38k

Echo this

One year hit the wrong letter code on my W2 and changed quite a bit

Had to go to freetax USA and start from scratch to see where I went wrong

The total tax liability on $200k is ~$44k, so if you had $38k withheld and still owe $10k you either have a typo in the data entry or you are grossly understating "some interest and dividends".

Id assume they mean 200k and 38k

You should check to see if you overpaid social security tax. Especially if neither job made $147,000, but the total of both jobs made more than that.

Employer payroll software have no knowledge of other jobs.

Box 1 on your W2 is the total amount of income you received from your employer. Box 2 is the amount of federal tax withheld by your employer.

So you are telling me you earned a total of $200 for the entire year and paid only a total of $38 in federal tax, and somehow owe $10k? I can't even begin to express how wrong your entire situation sounds.

You only made $200 in taxable income last year? How much did you make from interest and dividends?

Seems like it is time to pay a professional $500 to do your taxes. It is likely an EA or CPA will save you way more than $500 by doing your taxes correctly, and also making sure your W4 is correct for 2023.

You'd have to be making $120K and single with no dependent children with only the standard deduction to be paying $20K in federal taxes. Or $160K and married with no dependent children with only the standard deduction to be paying $20K in federal taxes.

If you are making significantly less than this than something is off with your calculations.

If you are making around that much, it's time to get married and have a couple of kids! Kidding of course but it does significantly lower your tax liability.

At $120K gross, married filing jointly with 2 kids and tax credits associated with them, pre-tax deductions such as healthcare and 401K you can get your federal tax liability down to under $2000.

I have a very basic situation, single, standard w2 income, some interest and dividends from savings/brokerage accounts. 1 & 2 were around 200 and 38. Default withholding seems very low

I'm pretty sure they include the standard deduction by default because that is the minimum deduction. Thankfully I itemize 2x that and was able to get it down to 5k. The default withholding definitely seems way off. I'm a very basic case, only other missing pieces are interest/dividends and that will only increase the bill

"The highest default" doesn't mean you're going to owe $0 at the end of the year. Depending on a lot of variables, you may have to add and additional amount in step 4-c for extra withholdings.

So you didn't actually complete your tax return? There's no way to calculate what you owe (or what your refund is) until your tax return is 100% accurate and complete.

I'm not sure I had a place to do that, my withholding still seems wonky for this upcoming year... the old job over withheld payout and was a smaller % of wages

Itemized deductions got me down to 5k, still a bit concerned for next year. ~200 and 37

w2

Did you enter your income from the previous job and the tax withheld from that in the portal for the new job? If not then the new job would assume your yearly income to be much less (since you started mid year) and your tax withholding would be lower than what it should be when consider both incomes.

I did automatically import it but thank you for your calming response

I did

Oh I assumed OP went past the initial income part. This is definitely what’s going on. They just need to go through the next section (sounds like standard deduction) to figure out that whatever number they see now will change significantly.

Many things could go wrong. Two main ones are not including your spouse’s job on the form if you are married, or not including a second job if you are single or married.

If you claim like 6 dependents when you should be claiming 0, that would be incorrect.

What are boxes 1 and 2 on your W2? You might have entered something incorrectly in TurboTax assuming you did pay the expected amount of income tax.

Taxes suck. I’ve gone through and made mistakes that gave me an initial heart attack.

Did you get a W2 or a 1099?