Taxes - Time’s Almost Up, Lessons of the Year
Tuesday, April 17th is the big day. Are you ready?
Unfortunately, I had some delays in getting a form signed so that we could claim my step-daughter on our taxes so ours is off tonight. Yeah, I’m a procrastinator, huh?
Actually, I learned a lot this year and I think it would be good to document it here so I remember next time around.
1. My husband agreed to a survey from Microsoft after aggressively being pursued by them. By “aggressively”, I mean, they called us a lot. In return for his cooperation, they mailed him a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio. He’s done surveys like this before for them, but this year was different. They mailed him a 1099-MISC for $799 of income, the retail value of the software they sent him. Had we known they were going to do that, he wouldn’t have accepted it. Why? That resulted in about $200 of taxes.
2. TurboTax freaked at this and insisted that we must own a business and insisted on charging us a self-employment tax. TaxAct, the downloadable program (as opposed to the website), however, did not.
3. The form I needed to get signed so that we could claim my step-daughter was because she didn’t live with us. We had to get her mom to sign away her right to claim her this year. TaxAct insisted that we needed this. After reading through all of the documentation on this, this seems to be a correct assumption. TurboTax, however, disagreed.
4. This is the second year in a row I used both TurboTax and TaxAct to compare the two results. This is the second year in a row that TaxAct has won, based on accuracy and thoroughness of the questions and details.
5. Why even bother with TurboTax? My car insurance company, State Farm, has an agreement with TurboTax to use TurboTax Deluxe Online for free, including free e-filing. Still, though, two years in a row I have been disappointed. Will I do it again next year? Sure. I’m a sucker and always hopeful that companies will make the effort and improve upon their product.
Every year, my taxes provide a great learning experience. I’m a numbers cruncher by nature. I got that from my mom who could never be found without a tablet of paper and a bunch of random numbers all over them. We didn’t always know what she was calculating, but she did. For a woman who hadn’t worked for many years, before I was even born, she could talk circles around anyone about taxes. She did them herself every year and it always amazed me to see how on top of things she was, considering how disorganized her paperwork always seemed to me. She must have had some method to her madness, though, because the taxes were way more complicated than mine and they never intimidated her one bit.
I can only aspire to be that in tune and well versed in taxes as she was.
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