Thursday, February 23, 2006
Thursday, right?
Thought so.
Got the important part of our taxes done yesterday. (The part that gets us money.) That was when my brain asploded, I am pretty sure. Part of it was irritation at getting back half of what we might have. I foolishly made about $500 too much for Caro to be able to claim me as a dependent...but oh, well, I have been TRYING to do better with selling stuff, so I can't really complain. On the plus side, as a non-dependent I can get a whopping EIC of $296 to put against the $575 I owe for Self Employment tax.
The bit that really annoys me is that they changed the law about children as dependents in regards to getting the additional tax breaks. Used to be ANY child that lived as a member of your family, for whom you provided more than half the living costs for, could be counted as a dependent child. Now, no. The child has to be related to you or placed by a foster or adoption agency. (Oh, and widow(er)s with a foster child get the same shaft!)
I mean, gee, Bush's billionaire buddies NEED their tax breaks, you know. Can't have people going around actually providing homes and care for kids out of the goodness of their hearts and expecting the same tax breaks for it as married heteros! (Just to say a for instance...no offense to my traditionally paired friends and family.)
THEN I started trying to do the eFile thing, which I have done in years past. Couldn't remember which company we used before, though. So I picked one at random....
EIGHT tries later I finally managed to complete the filing correctly, though it still took some doing--and TurboTax (which was our winner) flips you an ad of some kind about every three screens! I KNOW we have a complicated filing, with the K-1 and the self-employment tax and all that. But some of those sites didn't even HAVE an option for the trickier stuff, and some of them had glitches so that if you made a mistake, you couldn't go back to fix it!
So just a hint: if YOU are planning to eFile, do your return YOURSELF beforehand and know what you should be getting. Don't count on generalized software to do it for you, because it probably won't get it right!
All I have to do now is fill out the fairly simple forms for our official business reporting that the IRS requires, and MAIL them in. And of course cough up my $279 by April 15th. But by this evening I should have all the mean ugly bad nasty tax forms back in their file and hidden away in the filing cabinet so I don't have to look at them until 2007.
Yay. I go like a girl.
Got the important part of our taxes done yesterday. (The part that gets us money.) That was when my brain asploded, I am pretty sure. Part of it was irritation at getting back half of what we might have. I foolishly made about $500 too much for Caro to be able to claim me as a dependent...but oh, well, I have been TRYING to do better with selling stuff, so I can't really complain. On the plus side, as a non-dependent I can get a whopping EIC of $296 to put against the $575 I owe for Self Employment tax.
The bit that really annoys me is that they changed the law about children as dependents in regards to getting the additional tax breaks. Used to be ANY child that lived as a member of your family, for whom you provided more than half the living costs for, could be counted as a dependent child. Now, no. The child has to be related to you or placed by a foster or adoption agency. (Oh, and widow(er)s with a foster child get the same shaft!)
I mean, gee, Bush's billionaire buddies NEED their tax breaks, you know. Can't have people going around actually providing homes and care for kids out of the goodness of their hearts and expecting the same tax breaks for it as married heteros! (Just to say a for instance...no offense to my traditionally paired friends and family.)
THEN I started trying to do the eFile thing, which I have done in years past. Couldn't remember which company we used before, though. So I picked one at random....
EIGHT tries later I finally managed to complete the filing correctly, though it still took some doing--and TurboTax (which was our winner) flips you an ad of some kind about every three screens! I KNOW we have a complicated filing, with the K-1 and the self-employment tax and all that. But some of those sites didn't even HAVE an option for the trickier stuff, and some of them had glitches so that if you made a mistake, you couldn't go back to fix it!
So just a hint: if YOU are planning to eFile, do your return YOURSELF beforehand and know what you should be getting. Don't count on generalized software to do it for you, because it probably won't get it right!
All I have to do now is fill out the fairly simple forms for our official business reporting that the IRS requires, and MAIL them in. And of course cough up my $279 by April 15th. But by this evening I should have all the mean ugly bad nasty tax forms back in their file and hidden away in the filing cabinet so I don't have to look at them until 2007.
Yay. I go like a girl.
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