The six-figure club.

Wrong. It is always beneficial to your bank account to make more money, period.

 

When you file taxes for the year, weeks that you earned more and we're taxed slightly higher will be offset by any time you missed. Most people will recover some or all of the extra taxes when they file.

I like big checks occasionally, but, 55 hours a week is plenty already, IMO. If you don't need the money enjoy life by not working every waking moment.

 

The two federal tax brackets any of us are going to fall into are 22% and 24%. The line is at $89,075. The difference is literally $200 in extra taxes for an additional $10,000 earned above that point (2%). If you make less than $89k for the year, you are literally never entering a new bracket no matter how much OT you work in a week. It doesn't matter how much you earn in any given pay period. What you are seeing on your check is just withholding, not the actual amount of taxes you are paying. It will all even out on your 1040. The extra withholding will just translate into a higher refund.

All I'm saying is that the difference is pretty small, not the massive chunk the "higher tax bracket" argument implies. The reality of how much you are taxed is what ends up on your tax return, not on your paystub.

 

This is my thinking exactly. I’m a Linehaul guy at Estes, I made right at 90k on a 475 mile laydown run that takes me about 7.75 hrs per night to complete, no stops. I can actually have a life other than working. I ran real hard in 2018, had no life and grossed 102k at a lesser cpm rate, back when it actually meant something.

 

You and Roger are giving us a lot of good information and it’s appreciated. I always just rolled my eyes at the folks that made the claim of not wanting to work a little extra because of taxes. I always asked them if maybe they didn’t want a raise next year because it would put them in a “higher bracket” and they never know what to say at that point.

 

Well the tax bracket don’t effect it like they say.

$2385 gross
$1781 net
$601 taxes

$2083 gross
$1592 net
$490 tax

$1734 gross
$1326 net
$407 taxes


I’ll keep the 2k and above gross. It’s not really a massive difference.

 

Made it this year

 

I don't intentionally avoid work after the 55 hour mark, I just don't find the incentive to volunteer to keep working when I much rather just go home and spend time with my family.

I respectfully disagree with the "tiny amount" on your comment. I just got done filing my taxes. I paid over $15k last year. That's a lot of taxes for driving on roads this crappy.

 

The first part I have no disagreement with - family time has definitive value. It's the second part that doesn't sit well with me.

I'm not saying the taxes you pay are negligible. I'm saying the difference in taxes you pay between working 55 hours a week and 60 hours is negligible compared to the increase in income. Increasing a person's income by $600 a week increases their effective tax rate by 1 percentage point. That increase by itself is not a valid argument for not wanting to work more.

There are many other valid arguments, but increased taxation is not among them.

 

First off, if someone professional crunched all the numbers, the final outcome is probably that I am wrong.

Maybe it is just 1 percentage point, but it definitely seems a lot more than that. And yes, as another colleague pointed out, this is something I could recover once the extra long weeks get diluted with the regular long weeks and I have to file my taxes at the end of the year.