income taxes

[edenfalling]

Am halfway through doing my federal tax return. Do not have to file schedules B or D this year -- yay! (Fuck dividends anyway.) Have no idea yet whether I owe the gov't money or they owe me money. Am hoping the latter, as I will have a dental bill to pay in a couple weeks, and the last three times I got a raise my health insurance immediately ate it so I am running as fast as I can to stay in the same place I started, boo hiss.

And then it's NY state tax time.

...

Secretly I like doing my taxes, tedious though the process is. I find something deeply satisfying about lining numbers up in neat equations and making everything play nice until I get the correct answer. *grin*


ETA: Took me longer than it ought to have done, because I had to hunt down my IRA statements in case I was allowed a savings deduction (I was bad about filing financial information last year; I just tossed all the papers into a grocery bag in a giant unsorted muddle), but I got to the end of the form and discovered that I owe the IRS $96.77. Bah. But I think I adjusted my withholding in January, so hopefully next year I'll get a refund.

Now on to state taxes! NY refused to mail the forms to anyone this year, in an attempt to cut budget shortfalls, but I picked up the forms and instruction booklet from the library in February. NY is much simpler than NJ, since half the form is basically "copy line whatever from your federal 1040 form," but they also make you copy your W-2 forms out by hand instead of just stapling them to the return, which is annoying.

ETA2: And I owe NY $66.07. Which is a grand total of $162.84 that I am sending off to various governments, on top of all the money they withheld during 2008. Bother. But next year I should (if all goes to plan) be able to claim tuition credits, which should at least mitigate the state taxes.

(My secret evil plan is to go back to college via internet courses, starting this fall. Details are still up in the air, but Vicky is kicking my ass into gear, so 2009 will hopefully be the year something actually happens on that front. *grin* Of course, it will take a minimum of two years to graduate, since it's hard to take more than two or three courses while working full time, but it would be very nice to have a degree proving that I am a trainable monkey.)

Comments

[aishuu.livejournal.com]

I'm kind of waiting for NYS to say "NO RETURNS! WE'RE KEEPING IT!" since there's the huge budget deficit.

[edenfalling]

I think that would be illegal, though, wouldn't it?

Hmm. Can they make tax laws retroactive? That seems kind of intrusive...

[aishuu.livejournal.com]

NYS? Intrusive? Never.

And when has illegality bothered our lovely, dysfunctional legislature?

[edenfalling]

Fair point. *sigh*

[supplanter.livejournal.com]

I did my own tax returns for the first time this year, but I did them both online for free (turbotax lets you do your federal free, whereas NJ has a webfile system which is a little trickier but my taxes aren't so complicated anyway).  In the case of turbotax, it mostly asks you for isolated bits of info and then lines up all the numbers for you, so I guess you wouldn't enjoy it, though I found it fun to watch the amount of my state and federal returns fluctuate.

And then I proofread my mom's paper return, which was boring... but I did find an error, hurrah!  So it wasn't for naught....

[edenfalling]

One thing I especially like about having moved to New York is not having to do NJ state taxes anymore. I remember one year I did a preliminary NJ tax return (in pencil), was unsure about a few things and took it to my dad, who got a different answer, and then checked it over again myself and got a third answer... all of which were, so far as we could tell, based on perfectly legal and valid ways of interpreting the tax booklet instructions! So I just used the one that had me owing the least money. :-)

Unless you live in NYC or Yonkers, NY is much more straightforward.