After doing our taxes last year, I was so excited by the big return (no doubt going to pay a bill) that it never occurred to me that I was ignoring all of the investments The Woman sold. So when I found some paperwork months later that pointed this out… well… let’s just say that a panic attack was narrowly avoided. But a funny thing happened when that information was entered into the tax software – it said the freakin’ man still owed me more money.
How could this be? After pouring over the original and modified returns it eventually became clear that you should be wary of using an online service for doing your taxes. The website never properly transferred all of our wonderful home ownership type deductions over – and they more than adequately canceled out the rediscovered income. But as I struggled to find all of the paperwork and eventually formatted and reinstalled computers, actually filing the modifications kept getting put off.
Fast forward to this month. Shortly before we leave for vacation a nice letter from the IRS made it’s way to us: In case you didn’t notice, you forgot about a crapload of money so, PAY US FOUR GRAND OR WE TAKE YOUR FIRST BORN! Just kidding about that – it was under $4,000.
While I was pretty sure they weren’t taking everything into account, it was still disconcerting. And it became even more disconcerting when I noticed things on their paperwork that I had no knowledge of. Crap! Tax prison, here I come!
After weeks of sorting out missing papers, mixed up numbers, and software installation (it’s really awesome that TaxCut wouldn’t open my federal return because it also contained a state return which it wouldn’t let me install since it thought it already was…) I finally figured it all out. And tomorrow, not only do I get to tell the freakin’ man that I don’t owe them anything, but I also get to tell them that they owe me money!
I’m not sure how I managed to miss reporting several thousand dollars of income and still come out several hundred dollars ahead of the game. Perhaps I should start offering to do other people’s taxes?
Congrats on that. Owing a crapload of money would have sucked. Investment income from sale (minus all the purchase costs and broker fees over the years) is taxed a small 10% flat tax, right?
That’s really odd that the tax program put you in for the standard deduction if your itemized deductions were bigger. I’d be pissed at them!
Thankfully for once we actually have the money that I could have paid it right away (thanks to Millionaire). Still, I didn’t want to… I’m not sure about the actual numbers, but it definitely seemed like more than 10%. But that might be because they lumped them all as 100% net returns from short term investments – that was nice.
I did it on H&R’s website. It’s pretty good if you’re just doing basic stuff, but it seems like it doesn’t automatically transfer stuff from one section to another. This year I really should use an actual person, but I might just put that off another year.
Speaking of prison, did you ever take care of that parking ticket? 🙂 I was never called to post bail, so I assume either you did, or the township forgot about you.
I’ve used TurboTax and TaxCut over the years, and TaxCut is really slipshod. The only reason I use SW at all is because we pay state tax to NY and NJ, and I hate figuring the credit from one state to the other manually. TaxCut got it wrong one year and basically asked me to do the calculation on paper another. I’ve bitten the bullet and paid more for TurboTax since then. I figure if I want to save money, I can do it by hand.
We’ve done TurboTax for two years now and every year we’ve gotten a good chunk of change back, and filing online and having direct deposit…..it’s THE BOMB!!!