By Elizabeth Davies
Over the last few years I’ve become accustomed to watching my money slip away. A huge chunk of it is gone before it even reaches my bank account, thus is the nature of being a student loaner for life.
Whilst we mourn the loss of that weekly wage percentage, we can at least feel safe in the warm, fuzzy thought that it’s going to a better place. It’s like attacking the trunk of a massive tree with a butter knife, it doesn’t seem like it’s doing anything at the time but after you’ve done it for twenty years you might be half way there.
At the moment I have three different tax codes, none of which I fully understand if I’m entirely honest. For my primary part time job my tax code is M SL, my second part time job is SB SL and my freelance work is WT. This means I have three different tax rates varying from 10.5% to 25%.
I loathe secondary income tax with nearly every inch of my soul, maybe just because I don’t fully understand it. Over my two part time jobs I work a standard 40 hour week. Yet my second job is taxed at a higher rate and therefore I make less than I would if I were working one full time job. Here is where my confusion lies. It feels like I’m being punished for having two sources of income. I’m not earning a huge amount of money, or more than my fair share in any sense of the word.
Obviously I would prefer to have one full time job, but that’s just not my current situation. When I first started working two jobs I was incredibly frustrated by secondary income tax and thought perhaps my tax return would be comparatively juicy, because surely there was some mistake. I was wrong.
Not only was my tax return practically non-existent, but what I did get was shrunk even more once the tax refund company I used had taken their 20% cut. I’ve since worked out how to file my own tax return and avoid these companies who target students that don’t know any better, but more on them later.
After standard tax add on student loan repayments. At this stage my repayments are still very small, but even a $20 deduction every week hits me hard. On top of this we also have KiwiSaver deductions. I understand saving for my retirement is important but it is a struggle to justify skipping lunch today so that I can afford an extra sherry in fifty years. I don’t even like sherry.
Looking at my pay slips these days is not far from depressing – I’m sure this only gets worse as I get older and (hopefully) earn more. It’s beginning to feel like I’ve worked hard and bought an ice cream, only to have someone bigger than me seize it and take the first lick, before passing it along to the next person and the next. Eventually I get it back but by the time I do it’s covered in other people’s spit and it’s a hell of a lot harder to savour the sweetness.
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Elizabeth Davies is a 23 year old post graduate journalism student at Auckland University of Technology. She lives with her partner in Epsom and spends her free time refurbishing vintage furniture and attempting to bake while fighting a daily battle against her bank balance. She writes a weekly article for interest.co.nz on money matters and financial struggles from a young person's perspective.
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