Remember that the individual changes are set to expire and your taxes will go up, while the corporate ones are permanent. At least for the house plan.
Yes, that’s why I said initially. I just could not visualize how losing itemizations + exemptions would compare with $24,000 standard deduction and was pleasantly surprised. At least for first year.
Yay that calculator is fun (thanks for pointing the way!). Using my 2016 tax return, my taxes are unchanged under House and like $200 lower on Senate side.
Once I included my tuition waivers though, it nearly quadrupled in both the House and Senate.
Woo! So much winning!
If your college charges you insanely high tuition when you’re not even taking classes, that sounds more like a problem with your college than the House bill.
That is what most colleges do during the research phase of the PhD.
Where’s your cite for the fact most colleges charge full tuition during the research phase? There are a lot of colleges which don’t do that.
I know it is true for my kid’s public university, and others on this thread have said it is true for theirs. I wonder if one reason for it is because it allows the student to continue to defer payment on undergraduate student loans. I think the student has to be enrolled at least half time for this deferment to continue.
I did the marketwatch calculator, and it calculated that we’d get a tax cut, not a tax increase, like I thought. It shows I would have saved $7,885 under the House plan, and $15,206 under the Senate plan on my taxes for last year. Supposedly. Unless this is a decoy tax calculator to get people to support it and then ram more taxes down their throat.
However, whether I get a tax break or not, I still don’t support it. Not worth it to rack up more debt for the country, and all the tax increases to others.
Ro - grad schools I am familiar with require that their students register for a research seninar and x number of research credits which usually amounts to full time student status.
We need to be careful to make a distinction between number of credit hours enrolled and half time status. Some colleges will consider you a full time student, even though you’re only enrolled in 2 credit hours - dissertation residency. If a college requires you to be registered in 12 credit hours, even when not taking classes, or charges the same rate to all grad students, irrespective of the number of credit hours, that’s a choice of the individual college. It has nothing to do with undergrad loan deferment.
My kid’s school requires them to register for research credits.
@busdriver11, don’t forget that your tax cuts are set to expire in the bill, while the corporate ones are not.
Yes, so which cuts expire and when? That would be helpful to know and calculate. I know the child tax credit expires in 5 years. What else?
All of the cuts except the corporate cuts expire within 5 years.
But I don’t think you get your deductions back.
These bills are utter disasters and it is completely insane for any significant tax reform to be rushed through like this.
By contrast, the Reagan-supported Tax Reform Act of 1986 was revenue neutral and took more than 10 months between introduction and passage – https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/99/hr3838 – it was bipartisan, with prominent Democrats co-sponsoring the bill.
I just wanted to says how disasterous this will be for my elderly parent’s getting long term care. With the money I need to pull from their investments to care for them, it will cost them thousands of dollars. This is money I could use for their care.
All the individual tax cuts expire.
So…thinking this through…maybe…maybe the doubling of the standard deduction will help my kid who is getting a tuition waiver?
Maybe?
It is insanity. Something so huge, that will effect everyone in some way, to be rushed just so they can say they passed something major this year. Or is it being rushed to get passed while the makeup of Congress is still favorable to getting it passed?
I remember how many people hated the Tea Party with a vengeance, but I’ll bet they are missing them now. 
HELOC change - popular option to pay for college - under Senate plan - HELOC interest wil no longer be deductible - even if you still itemize. I am having difficulty linking - but this is from the Ken Harvey column in today’s Wash Post.
Let’s use the University of Michigan as an example. It looks like after passing the qualifying exams,
However, it goes on to say:
What is candidacy tuition? It looks like it’s free for Michigan residents in most programs.
http://www.ro.umich.edu/tuition/tuition-fees.php
My kid doesn’t go to Michigan. The House themselves says this will raise $5.4 billion in revenue over 10 year if the waivers are taxed. I’m not sure why parsing how every college does it makes a difference. I also don’t see why this change should be in the tax bill AT ALL. If the doubters on this thread are right and colleges will find a simple, essentially cost free way to evade the tax, then your representatives are scamming you and the American people on the cost of giving this tax break to corporations. Either way it is a problem.
The Washington Post has done a nice job of summarizing all the impacts on college costs in this articlehttps://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/11/16/government-analysis-shows-house-tax-bill-would-increase-the-cost-of-college-by-71-billion-over-a-decade/?utm_term=.70fd35bc095f
And when it says “would increase the cost of college”, that means changing the tax code so corporations (whose CEOs have admitted the tax break won’t cause them to invest more) and wealthy people will get a tax break. And regular families and grad students will pay more for higher education and/or more taxes because of the changes.