I had some tasks to do today before our trip on Saturday. We won’t be back until July, which is the start of a new financial year. So I need to get some tax stuff sorted out before we leave, to make sure it’s done in time.
Since I’m earning a significant amount of income teaching on Outschool, and they’re based in the USA, that income isn’t subject to pay-as-you-go tax being taken out by the Australian Tax Office. I need to keep my accounts straight and submit it on my tax return, and then pay a lump sum in tax at the end of the financial year. There’s also no automatic contribution to my superannuation fund, so I need to calculate a reasonable amount to pay into it myself, in order to optimise my income tax versus retirement investment and blah blah blah… it’s all really tedious and you probably don’t want to read the details.
Anyway, the result is that I did a bunch of calculations and I had to figure out how to transfer a sum of cash from my bank account into my retirement plan and then do that. The transfer takes a few days because of bank shenanigans, and then I have to submit a form to claim the transferred amount as a tax deduction, before the end of June.
The main reason I’m writing about this today is that there wasn’t much else to talk about – it was a pretty uneventful day. I had a final make-up class for the recently completed Creative Thinking and Game Design course, which one student had to miss because of unavailability, so today’s class was just for that one kid so he could have the final lesson. But both of the other kids showed up briefly in the Zoom call! They must have received an email notification that a class was starting, and they both showed up a bit confused until I explained that it was a make-up class for the one other kid, and they didn’t need to attend.
And this evening I started the next ethics topic with three classes, on Natural Resources. This is a repeat of a topic I did a couple of years ago when I started this course, and none of the students who did it then are still in the classes, so I get to recycle it.
New content today: