How did your tax return come out? I usually get back $3000. This year, I have to pay $2000.

[haele]

55. Sounds like he was talking about both.

I always shift up my exemptions around the early/middle part of the year once the rules are finalized. I make the attempt to break even - a plus or minus $200 with the refund or owed taxes with the feds has pretty much been my goal since I started working 40 years ago.
Here's the issue I as I've experienced it as an "above the median, but below six figures" professional wage earner.
We actually ended up paying more in taxes over the year to break even and still ended up owing $500 over our normal break even point - and I changed my withholdings to "single" last April (I'm the only wage earner).

It wasn't that my company gave me more back for "exemptions" over the year, it's that due to all the losses of the itemized deductions I used to be able to write off - business type deductions, SALT, etc.,
I actually owed more without having a pay raise or otherwise a change. I actually got less "in my pocket" over the year because I changed our exemptions so I wouldn't get socked with a nasty surprise.
I don't have a mortgage. I don't own a business, even though I have "professional" expenses that used to be tax deductible. I'm just a normal working stiff living in a home we own free and clear, a student loan payment, and three dependents - one a disabled spouse who doesn't work and two are children under the age of 17. (That supposedly wonderful "$2K per kid" tax credit didn't work too well, did it?)

I still ended up owing $500 more in taxes this year than last year. At least it wasn't the $3K or so we would have owed if I had taken the exemptions the IRS suggested in their W4 worksheet...

Boy howdy, my State Tax refund did go up - I got every penny I paid to the State of California. $4K instead of the normal $1200.

I guess that might have made up for it; maybe I should have taken that extra $60 a paycheck and used my California return to pay my Federal return this year...

But I do feel for my co-workers. Most of them weren't as proactive as I was; and too many of them thought they were actually getting a tax cut and a pay raise under President Dumpster Fire. The average paycheck bump in the office was around $150 over 20 paychecks; so a gain of around $3K.

The average tax differential between last year and this year was a loss of $4K.
Most got a net increase of $1K in the Federal Tax owed for 2018 over 2017, with little to no change in financial status.

Haele