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My $200+ Weekly Raise? It Was a Tax Mistake (and Pendant Saved Me!)Alright, so this will likely be the most embarrassing blog post I write on behalf of Pendant. Here’s the long story short: I made a mistake while on-boarding (would’ve loved to have had this) at my current employment and was paying double taxes for over a year. Upon fixing this mistake, my weekly take-home pay skyrocketed by more than $200. It’s like I gave myself the biggest raise of my career. And if it wasn’t for Pendant? I honestly might’ve never noticed.
Let’s rewind back to my onboarding a little over a year ago. Like any new job, I had a mountain of documents to sign, paperwork to fill out, and big decisions to make about benefits and tax withholdings. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ll easily sign something before reading all the fine print (door-to-door pest control sales people love me), and there’s a lot of things to sign with a new job. Well, as you can imagine, that mentality did not serve me with my on-boarding process and somewhere along the way, I entered my salary as an extra source of income. Because of that small snafu, I’ve been paying taxes for double my salary. Whoops!
Now, I know what you’re thinking.
“Shouldn’t have that been obvious the moment you got your first paycheck?”
“Wasn’t it obvious once you got a massive tax return at the start of the year?”
“Surely you have someone in your life that would catch such an obvious mistake?”
The answer to all three of those questions? Yes. My bad. I should’ve known.
As finances became tighter at home and my wife and I discussed ratcheting up (or more accurately, down) our budget, I wanted to take a look at my paystub to better understand the breakdown of my pay. Naturally, my first step was to check Pendant.
Whenever I have an HR-related question, I start with the Pendant A.I. assistant:
I followed the steps as outlined by the assistant, and next thing you know, I was looking at my paycheck breakdown:
You can imagine where the story goes from here. That red piece of the pie felt abnormally big and, after Googling tax rates, it was clear something needed to change. Time to go back to my old friend, the Pendant AI assistant:
I followed the steps exactly as outlined, and botta bing botta boom, my tax withholdings were fixed and my paycheck jumped up considerably. Turns out I will indeed be able to keep my Switch 2 preorder.
Having an AI that’s intimately aware of my HR situation is extremely helpful. Gemini, ChatGPT, you name it–they have no idea what my specific HR situation looks like. Those AI tools could offer some level of guidance, but I’m never going to get a step-by-step list of instructions that perfectly answers my question. Since the Pendant AI assistant has access to all of my HR-related docs, it provides answers that I can trust.
