Remember my lament about being overwhelmed and how I was making lists and using my calendar to keep me on track. I also adopted the word ACCEPTANCE for my Lent challenge.
I don’t do Lent stuff, but this year I decided to get my life a bit more organized, on track, and what better time than Lent. I’m still not doing the ashes on the forehead practice. Nor do I give up anything for Lent. I usually add something, like providing for a charity, but never giving up something.
Today I checked Taxes off the list. It should have been checked off a couple of weeks ago, when I originally started out, but I found one of Terry’s forms was missing. Then he discovered that the Department of Defense only had one day a month to make contact and make requests. Finally, the form appeared and I could continue with inputting the tax information. Total time on the computer, connected to Turbo Tax, 2 hours and 17 minutes. Big relief to have that done.
Here’s the thing, I am NOT any sort of accounting person. I hate financial stuff. I hate filling out forms. But, after almost 40 years of having a tax person, we no longer had one, and since our credit union offers Turbo Tax as a benefit, I decided to give it a try.
My mother, over 50 years ago, could not understand why we hired someone to do our taxes. “You both have a college degree, can’t you figure it out?”
Not only was the answer NO, but also that I didn’t want to figure it out, and if I left it to Terry, he would probably have to file for an extension and pay late fees.
The tax man that we hired came to our home, put everything together while drinking coffee at our dining room table. He came to each of our three homes, and even made sure to get to us early in the season when our daughter was in college so she could file FAFSA forms before March.
If we suggested a deduction that we knew others had done, he would tell us it was a bit iffy and could trigger an audit. He laid out all the deductions we could take and kept us on the straight and narrow. I recommended him to lots of people over the years because he was such a straight arrow. And then we learned otherwise.
Although super aboveboard and honest with us, it turned out some of his other clients were being taken in with shady investment schemes. He was running a Ponzi scheme but he never mentioned any kind of investments to us. Maybe because we didn’t have a whole lot of money. A friend of mine used his services and he regularly told her about investment opportunities. Turns out, those opportunities put him in prison for 20 years. I was devastated. Now who would do our taxes!
I had made a friend on one of the Compuserve forums. She lived in San Francisco and we had met her and other forum members for dinner many times in the city. She was a tax preparer and said I could mail her our documents and she would do our taxes. We could take her out to dinner when we were in town for payment. I even housesat for her one time while she attended a tax conference in Reno. She was wonderful. And then she died.
I was bereft because I had lost a good friend, and also a good tax preparer. Someone suggested Turbo Tax. And that’s what we have done now for the past few years. Or, I should say, I have done.
This year had more details, more items to look up and figure out. I accepted the task. I got it done. Check.
Oh, and in addition, the IRS and the State Franchise Tax Board have both accepted the forms.
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