Time to do taxes again... April 15th can't be put off much longer.
What I seem to struggle with is that I get older and life gets more complicated, so do those darned taxes! I long for the day when I'd hand my dad my single W-2 and bam! I'd get $100 deposited into my checking account.
There's also the time when I filed my taxes myself over the phone and just pressed a few buttons and received my tax return a few days later.
Then. I. got. married.
And since this momentous occassion, taxes have been a luming plague over our heads and something we dread. We end up having a pile of roughly 30 pages of "stuff" to bring into the taxman. Who knows what all this means or if it is even relevant, but it gets sent to us with a stamp on the envelope urging us to save it for taxes.
Two years ago our tax lady spent a good portion of the meeting bashing my new place of business as I was just starting as a nurse at MeritCare and she continued to tell me why Innovis is better and why she does not like MeritCare. Meanwhile also adding comments in about why my husband and I have so many W-2's and why everything was such a mess. Hence, why we went to see you in the first place lady! Having a young married couple with one in school just trying to stay afloat financially, we're sorry if it's an inconveince for you to file our 8 W-2's! And yes, it's just as frustrating to us that PRACS does not tax their checks and that my husband enjoys being a lab rat to benefit us greatly in the short-term but bite our tax paying booties in the long-run... Oh how we were saved by the education credits that year and didn't have to pay in but did not get much of a return either!
Last year was more pleasant as we went to an accountant that is on the Babe Ruth board and knows Tyler well. Well or so it was supposed to be ;) The person working with us was much more pleasant, but we still had our fair share of W-2's and "stuff" to sort through. As most of you know, I was not in school during the year of 2008, but what can I say? My husband loves his part-time jobs, aka "hobbies" :). We also bought a house this year but did not benefit greatly from this. We ended up getting hit with having to pay in, but were saved by the tax credit for new home buyers (if only we'd have waited one year we wouldn't be paying that back for the next 15 years...)
This year and the prompting behind this post is that Tyler and I believed we would just bring in our batch of "stuff" again as we always had before and then we'd sit through a grueling/embarassig/awkward 1/2 hour meeting until we could find out if we owed more money or happily got some given back to us. However, as Tyler was getting the "stuff" together that morning he came across the 2009 Tax Organizer that our friendly accountant gave to us to prepare our list of "stuff" for him. Now he must have seen people like us coming from a mile away and decided it was about time for us to sort through our own "stuff". This organizer wants everything listed and itemized from what you spent on contact lenses to prescriptions. If I wasn't so intuned to knowing that all these things could add up, especially the expenses of having a child and a husband that got orthodontic surgery and braces this year, I wouldn't have spent the time preparing this stuff and pouring over our bank statements (which I might add were all still in the envelopes and hadn't been opened the whole past year - oops - never would have thought I worked at a bank for 3 years)...
So my question is this - why must one spend good money (We know they're not cheap) to organize my taxes just so that someone with the right software and know-how can imput the data for me and get paid like the did all the hard work?
Answer: Because I just don't have the time?! Oh wait. I just spent an hour putting this thing together - why didn't I spend that filling out my own 1099 form?
What I seem to struggle with is that I get older and life gets more complicated, so do those darned taxes! I long for the day when I'd hand my dad my single W-2 and bam! I'd get $100 deposited into my checking account.
There's also the time when I filed my taxes myself over the phone and just pressed a few buttons and received my tax return a few days later.
Then. I. got. married.
And since this momentous occassion, taxes have been a luming plague over our heads and something we dread. We end up having a pile of roughly 30 pages of "stuff" to bring into the taxman. Who knows what all this means or if it is even relevant, but it gets sent to us with a stamp on the envelope urging us to save it for taxes.
Two years ago our tax lady spent a good portion of the meeting bashing my new place of business as I was just starting as a nurse at MeritCare and she continued to tell me why Innovis is better and why she does not like MeritCare. Meanwhile also adding comments in about why my husband and I have so many W-2's and why everything was such a mess. Hence, why we went to see you in the first place lady! Having a young married couple with one in school just trying to stay afloat financially, we're sorry if it's an inconveince for you to file our 8 W-2's! And yes, it's just as frustrating to us that PRACS does not tax their checks and that my husband enjoys being a lab rat to benefit us greatly in the short-term but bite our tax paying booties in the long-run... Oh how we were saved by the education credits that year and didn't have to pay in but did not get much of a return either!
Last year was more pleasant as we went to an accountant that is on the Babe Ruth board and knows Tyler well. Well or so it was supposed to be ;) The person working with us was much more pleasant, but we still had our fair share of W-2's and "stuff" to sort through. As most of you know, I was not in school during the year of 2008, but what can I say? My husband loves his part-time jobs, aka "hobbies" :). We also bought a house this year but did not benefit greatly from this. We ended up getting hit with having to pay in, but were saved by the tax credit for new home buyers (if only we'd have waited one year we wouldn't be paying that back for the next 15 years...)
This year and the prompting behind this post is that Tyler and I believed we would just bring in our batch of "stuff" again as we always had before and then we'd sit through a grueling/embarassig/awkward 1/2 hour meeting until we could find out if we owed more money or happily got some given back to us. However, as Tyler was getting the "stuff" together that morning he came across the 2009 Tax Organizer that our friendly accountant gave to us to prepare our list of "stuff" for him. Now he must have seen people like us coming from a mile away and decided it was about time for us to sort through our own "stuff". This organizer wants everything listed and itemized from what you spent on contact lenses to prescriptions. If I wasn't so intuned to knowing that all these things could add up, especially the expenses of having a child and a husband that got orthodontic surgery and braces this year, I wouldn't have spent the time preparing this stuff and pouring over our bank statements (which I might add were all still in the envelopes and hadn't been opened the whole past year - oops - never would have thought I worked at a bank for 3 years)...
So my question is this - why must one spend good money (We know they're not cheap) to organize my taxes just so that someone with the right software and know-how can imput the data for me and get paid like the did all the hard work?
Answer: Because I just don't have the time?! Oh wait. I just spent an hour putting this thing together - why didn't I spend that filling out my own 1099 form?
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And as always: Here's my adorable 5 month old son, Emmett. Can't believe it's been 5 joyous months with him. He has now started to roll over both ways as of last week. He sits up really well now, but we still don't quite trust him alone where he wouldn't fall over. He's doing great at daycare and they say they love how much personality he has.. hehe.
The past few weeks we have been giving him a good helping of rice cereal at night. We know it's early, but he's a born eater - he is a Tracy afterall! He loves to grab the spoon from me and chew on it... Just this past week, he has started to get himself up onto his knees as if he thinks he's going to start crawling! I know he won't quite yet, but it's pretty crazy to think he knows already that's his first step in that process...
Good post Mand! You're paying too good of money to put up with those antics. if you don't like your CPA, find another one!
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