Clojurians Log v2

morning 🙂

Good Morning!

👋

I got a cheque from the tax man for over £2000 for last year - not sure if I should be pleased, or annoyed that they've been taking £170/month too much (and I don't recall any decrease in what I'm paying this year, so maybe they still are)

Lucky you. The last two years here we’ve ended up owing Federal taxes of around $3,500 due to Trump’s stupid “tax cut”.

(We’ve had money back from the State each time though — American taxes are way more complex than UK taxes 😞 )

It's certainly better than the other way round.

The first year Trump’s “tax cuts” came into effect, we went from getting a $3k refund to owing over $3k so basically his “tax cut” cost us $6k/year 😞

And I would so much prefer dealing with the Inland Revenue: they are so polite and, generally, competent. Our Inland Revenue Service is a terrible bureaucracy: inefficient, rude, and it’s like shouting into the void to get anything done 😐

Which reminds me, people working from home here in the UK, April has past, so, don't forget to renew your working from home tax benefit! <https://www.gov.uk/tax-relief-for-employees/working-at-home>

Extra £300, little, but every penny counts! 🙂

You have to do it each year. I did mine a few weeks ago

Need to identify myself first.

Thank you - I didn't realise I had to re-do it. I don't actually recall anything happening as a result of when I did it the last time

Did your tax code change?

I got a notification to say it had (also, you can log into the website with your universal tax number to see)

I don't remember it changing, but I may have just forgotten

So, the standard UK standard tax code is 1257L, which is the £12,570 standard personal allowance

after the change, I now have 1288L which is £12,880 allowance.

Mine was 1250L in March 2020, and was still 1250L in October 2020

Looks like you may be owed some money!

I don't have access to anything more recent than that, due to another saga

12880 - 12500 = £380. It looks like they refunded me for £170/month. 40% of £380 is £152

(Is 40% a relevant number? I may just be making that up)

So far I've received a cheque, with a letter saying that the calculations would come in a separate letter

But I haven't been given a new tax code

Try to apply for it, you have to do it every year. If that doesn't work, give them a bell 🙂

Yeah, I re-did it just now

One of the questions is about if you started working from home because of covid, which is still true until the end of June. I guess the answer to that will be no after that

I don't think it matters at all. It's for statistics. You could be working from home simply because you've negogiated that with your work, to put your home as your primary place of work

Could be that the company you work for is also 100% remote!, so that is just for statistical gathering

🤞

https://media.tenor.com/images/4c0b3af71cf05828c26f6ad946fa373b/tenor.gif

Morning

Morn'

morning

wow - that's 2 hours i'll never get back figuring out how to connect an RDS instance to S3 ...

AWS can be black magic is my experience

definitely black magic i found the solution in the end - it turned out that if your RDS instance is in a private VPC then there is another step, which was conveniently omitted from all the AWS docs on how to enable S3 access for RDS 😬 . stackoverflow thankfully plugged the gap, but it took me an age to work through all the AWS routes to finally figure out none of them worked

Sometimes AWS is too secure