Due to the fun of some sudden life changes as well as Covid-19, I literally have no idea what my AGI will be for 2020, and therefore whether or not I may have to pay back the stimulus prepayment. There are a lot of "new" things this year and I don't know how any of them factor in. I'm going to try to keep this short.
- My salaried income is comfortably under the $150,000/year limit for the stimulus payment.
- I sold a house that I owned for 1.5 years. The "raw" profit would put my income over the $150,000/year limit, but sellers costs ate all of that in practice.
- In Q2 this year my company announced a 20% pay cut for the quarter
- However they gave that lost income back in stocks, which vest at the end of this year
- The company stock has already almost doubled, so that pay cut is now actually a raise. However, I'm not planning to sell the stock this year, so I'm not sure what year it will count as "income".
- In Q3 my salary was returned to normal, and of course no more stocks were given.
Based on my 2019 tax return (which I file online and have sent via direct deposit), the federal government was happy to automatically send me a stimulus check for my wife and me + 5 kids. At the time I didn't think much of it.
Now I'm realizing that, depending on how AGI is calculated, I am either comfortably under or well over the $150,000/yr salary limit. I'm used to how wages comes into play for these things, but the details of home sales and stock are completely new to me. I figure that the two extreme scenarios are:
- Only the profit of the home sale after selling costs counts towards AGI, and stock doesn't figure until I sell it so will show up on my income next year. In this case my AGI is well under the limit and I don't have to pay back the stimulus payment.
- The raw "profit" on the house counts towards AGI and so does the stock when it vests. In this case my AGI is well over the payback limit.
Of course reality might be somewhere in between. So to end with an actual question: