Money and Business

We finally got the last of the tax forms in the mail today, so I finished up the (almost completely done) tax package and e-filed it in the Turbo Tax on-line repository where it will languish until the 31st of January when the IRS begins accepting returns. The tax program assured me that my return would be near the front of the line when the IRS opens the gates.

Our filing status did not change this year, but we had a considerable quantity if non-cash donations to local charities. When my Mother passed away last fall, we gave most of her personal things to Soroptimist and Habitat for Humanity. Between those donations and our normal ones, we had more deductions.

Because of the extra charitable donations last year, we overpaid both the Federal and State tax. As I may have mentioned before, I prefer to owe them each a small amount rather than letting them use our money interest free. I believe that I have adjusted both Federal and State withholding to underpay slightly this year. Meanwhile, we will be getting a total of less than $1K back.

By the way, I calculated what we would have owed Kalifornistan income tax just for kicks. I turns out that their tax rate is EIGHT TIMES that of Arizona’s in our income bracket. Between that little factoid and knowing what tax spenders out there spend the money on, makes me glad to be outa there. Hopefully, this is also the year we will be flipping our SoCal house and get out from under the outrageous property tax and insurance bills.

Tax season is here again, at least in our household. I had been waiting for our tax software provider to notify us of the availability of the product for the 2013 tax year. Today, the offer was in the mail. Not hesitating, I downloaded the software, installed it and dove right in to start putting in our 2013 data.

In a matter of less than an hour, I had most of the updated figures plugged into the program. We have a pretty similar tax situation to that of our 2012 return, so most things were already imported from last year by the software. A few tweaks here and there gave us a pretty good idea of where we will be when we finally file in early February.

Of course, the IRS will be modifying things until the December 31 deadline and probably beyond then knowing how efficient the .gov is. Meanwhile, we can pour over the figures we know about and look for some shortcuts to maximize our refund.