December 22, 2004

Adopting for Money

As promised in my previous entry, I will discuss the goldmine of tax deductions I discovered while attempting to determine if marrying is worthwhile monetarily (it is not, by the way). While the rumor that marriage could save money turned out to be a big lie, I discovered that you get deductions for each dependent you can claim.

As with the marriage thing, I was not quite sure what counted as a dependent and what did not, so I referred to this website, which defines in arduous detail what constitutes dependency. After spending a long time reading through the procedures, examples, and other verbosity, I finally came to the conclusion that you can take a deduction of $3,100 for each eligible dependent.

Wow! Exciting. Now, the hard part of the estimation: how much money would be required for the upkeep of a baby? I honestly have no idea, and moreover, do not really know anyone who I could ask about something as esoteric as this, except perhaps my parents, which I am not about to do. But seriously, it could not be more than $3,100, right? Of course not! I mean, what do babies require, anyway? Food? Diapers? They eat canned mush, for God's sake. Unless you have one hell of a fat ass baby, I don't think it can go through three grand in baby food and diapers.

Having concluded that having some form of a dependent is probably a good way of saving money on taxes, the next task was to determine a means of acquiring such an entity. Since it must arrive within the 2005 fiscal year to be of any use, there is definitely no time to pursue this matter through natural means. This leaves only adoption and convincing someone I'm capable of taking care of a child might get tricky. Furthermore, what I realized was that if I actually successfully adopted a child, then I would actually have to live with it, which would be completely unacceptable. Thus, I must sadly once again conclude that this scheme to save money, while attractive, cannot ultimately work, at least for the time being.

I do think, however, that a few years later, when I am making a lot more money, the horrors of living with a baby will eventually be balanced by the egregious losses to the government, and it will become more economically sound to bite the bullet and obtain a dependent (have a kid, that is). This, then, finally brings up a viable definition of love—finding a person you like enough to have a couple tax-deductible dependents with. Beautiful, is it not?