Easily Distracted

If you have any trouble understanding how income tax works or is calculated, play around on this webpage and see if it helps you. (It probably won’t, but you might have fun not learning anything!) It lets you dynamically compare different income taxes within Canada using a pretty graph and it lets you calculate your own (simplified) tax results, whether your income is salary or hourly based.

Why Did I do this?

I didn’t do my taxes; an accountant did. But when I was reading about them, I stumbled upon a couple webpages and became interested in the differences among the provinces and territories within Canada and
different income ranges. That’s what started this mini Javascript project.

This is not a work of art

I wrote it mostly on the bus using my recently acquired Dell Mini 12 netbook (on Windows XP… ew). And from that experience, I can firmly say that writing even very simple things, it’s good to have a fair amount of time set aside in a relaxed environment. I would write a couple things here and there for 20 minutes or so… then not look at it again for a few days… it took me 5 minutes to figure out what I wanted to do the next time I opened it. The only times I made significant progress was when I sat down for more than an hour. The code wasn’t really designed, it was just… written. It’s messy, there’s lots of hard-coding, poorly named fields and variables (didn’t help with figuring out what I was doing last time), and if it were anything serious, I’d rewrite large chunks of it. And make it prettier. But as it stands, it’s just kinda fun. 🙂

In addition to being curious about the taxes in Canada, I was also interested in trying a javascript graphing library. I had been impressed with different javascript-generated graphs on the web and wondered how difficult they were to create. I used FLOT (with lots of copying and pasting from examples), and it seemed to work alright, but it depends on JQuery, which I wasn’t familiar with. Actually, I’m still not very familiar with it… and wrote almost everything in regular javascript. I know it’s worth learning, but I guess I’ll save
that for another time. 🙂

Let me know of any errors in tax calculation.. or code design, for that matter. There’s lots of those, but I’m sure I’m not aware of all of them! hah.

(I’ve been sitting on this post for about 2 months now. hah! Figured I might as well publish it.)

I try to make all my purchases on credit card. This lets me easily review all my expenses each month, or at any time using online banking. (wooh, technology). So for my last statement, I downloaded it as a spreadsheet, did some grouping, and made a chart. I had to pull in some data from my debit card statement, as well, which wasn’t so accommodating (no CSV download), but I managed.

Monthly expenses: mid-April - mid-May 2009

The three categories at the top with a bold line around them are pretty static and not going to change much in the immediate future: rent, bus, and phone. The three categories at the bottom with grey outlines were exceptional and help make this month a more expensive one: a trip to whistler (all expenses, including eating out, hotel, etc), some clothes (which I don’t buy often), and a new computer. These make up more than half of my month’s expenses. The rest of it is the interesting stuff. Eating out and liquor account for the greatest remaining expenses…. and eating out includes drinking out, whereas liquor is basically for drinking in – so already I could drastically reduce my expenses by drinking in more and drinking out less, right? 😀 (I don’t see drinking out decreasing drastically, any time soon, however….)

Food is miscellaneous groceries I’ve bought, and is very small because I live at home and don’t generally buy groceries. For that same reason, my rent should actually be half of what it is, but I plan on paying at least double, for the time being. I find it funny that coffee (when I buy a coffee and or any muffin or baked good) has its own slice of the pie – but not unexpected. Because I don’t have a car, gas is ridiculously small, but I like to replace what I use when I borrow my mom’s car.

For me, it will be interesting to see what changes next month. 🙂 And who knows, at this rate, that might be the next time I blog! haha. ^_^;;

Oh, and I’ll be going to EAT!Vancouver, this weekend. I might even attend multiple days. I went last year and enjoyed it. It’s a barrage of samples and people trying to sell you stuff… and it’s where I tried and bought my RADA cutlery, which I like quite a bit. Thinking I might get a tomato knife or something. It’s only $12. If you’re looking for something to do this weekend, give me a shout. 😉