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View Full Version : Bus Passes Before Tax - Employee COMPLICATED benefit


heydude
10-17-12, 4:55pm
deleted for being too complicated
sweetana3
10-17-12, 8:32pm
Sometimes it just is not worth it.
iris lily
10-17-12, 10:31pm
Sometimes it just is not worth it.

yup!

dude, money buys you freedom from this kind of niggling stuff so it may well not be work it. Truly wealthy people get to buy their complete freedom, their time from the daily trials of life such as nit picky paperwork like this.
ToomuchStuff
10-18-12, 12:30pm
I am wondering if your trying/planning on disappearing, since your threads are?
heydude
10-20-12, 1:15am
no Sir

just sometimes, when i get detailed, and especially after i get little response, well, i start to feel dumb
rosarugosa
10-20-12, 8:38am
Heydude, I'm always happy to hear your voice on the forum. I had thought that I would participate in this thread, because I get my subway pass before taxes through my employer, but then saw that there wasn't really a thread to participate in.
heydude
10-22-12, 3:58pm
Heydude, I'm always happy to hear your voice on the forum. I had thought that I would participate in this thread, because I get my subway pass before taxes through my employer, but then saw that there wasn't really a thread to participate in.

oh wow thank you.

the jist is this:

they want to do it month to month.
they will take money out in october for december pass.

but, the passes i buy are 31 days on an electronic card.
therefore, i do not ride month to month, i ride 31 days to 31 days

this means, well, currently my pass is done on nov 15th.

sure, i can order dec pass and not start using it until dec 15.

but, you can only hold 2 passes on the electronic card on a time.

i worry that because i have to "purchase" through their system 2 months in advance....that i'll end up with 3 on the card and it will reject and spit it back out.

a pain in the butt to track where that 3rd pass is and when/how i need to skip a month. because it is hard to figure out when they actually use my money to put it on the card.
rosarugosa
10-22-12, 7:33pm
I do believe that my Oct deductions are for my Dec pass, but our passes are for the calendar month, so it isn't really too complicated. I like the convenience, because I used to have to go to the train station and wait in line to buy a pass. I like the pre-tax aspect, and I also get a discount on my auto insurance if I buy a pass for at least 11 months of the year. The downside is that I only take the train one-way for part of the year (get a ride into work from my DH), so I actually might be paying a little bit more (not much though). I should really crunch the numbers, but I admit that I like buying my pass this way even just for the convenience factor.
jp1
10-22-12, 8:52pm
Our passes are monthly, thankfully, as is the deduction. However, managing it is a complicated mess. I have my transit debit card as my auto payment method with the transit company, but I had to switch it for one month to my regular credit card because the fare had gone up $2 so now I need to change my withholding for just one month to $2 less then the current price. As it stands for 3 months now I've been overdeducted so I've got $60 extra on my transit debit card, but I just dread trying to fix that so I've been procrastinating.

This isn't as bad as my old employer. We got a new debit card each month for the monthly amount and you could shuffle money to the previous card but only for 3 months and then I had to put a new debit card in my transit provider's system for automatic payments.
heydude
10-23-12, 2:21am
can't this just all be worked in to the tax code so we can just deduct public trans expenses? i mean, paying a 3rd party to monkey around is just kinda, well it sucks
jp1
10-24-12, 10:06pm
heydude, I just wanted to thank you. After reading this thread the other day I got the notification about signing up for next year's benefits today. Remembering this thread I went to the trouble of figuring out how to log into my transit withholding account and changing it for next month to get back on track and not have extra money just sitting there.

Of course now that I've done this I imagine the transit company will raise fares again and throw my plan all off. They seem to do that 2-3x/year. 4 years ago the monthly was $45. Now it's $64, and I don't think any one increase has been more then $3.