Tom and I just finished our 2017 taxes, and while Tom barely broke a mental sweat through the whole ordeal, my brain is so over-heated you could scramble an egg on it. In fact it feels as if somebody already did. In any case, this year's tax-filing experience having borne such a remarkable resemblance to last year's tax-filing experience - except worse because now we had to figure out how to pay taxes on income from the books I'd sold - lump the book income in with the piano teaching income? Crack open a second business Schedule C? - anyway, my brain being in no mood, I decided to just re-publish last year's post on the subject: A Taxing Endeavor (Posted 4/5/2017) The Lieutenant Colonel is a wiz at many things, the filing of income taxes being among them.
...and he can whip his weight in pre-taxable, taxable and non-taxable entities, gross vs. net incomes, deductions, refundable credits, non-refundable credits, and applicable percentages derived by multiplying the light of the moon by a puppy dog's tail then dividing by your shoe size. The Lieutenant Colonel's wife, not so much. I've had no trouble learning Latin, French, German, Russian, Spanish, or a few words of Hungarian.
The aptitude for that sort of thing must reside on the side of my brain where nobody's home.
Or rather, for the purpose of him doing the taxes and me trying figure out what he's doing. To this end I always take voluminous notes, ...as I did once again this year. "But those are the same notes you took last year and the year before that and the year before that," said Tom, glancing at my notebook as I scribbled away, "why do go to the trouble of writing down the same things year after year?" "Repetition is the key to learning," I replied,
I do my best, though, to help fill in the forms with Tom's patient mentoring. "Now, how do you fill in this line?" he asks me. "You fill it in with 'ABC,' " I reply, jubilant that I've finally cracked the code of a single line item. "No, you fill it in with "XYZ," he corrects me. "What?" I cry in dismay, "how do you figure that?"
Anyway, it never seems to me that we rake in or hand out enough cash annually to merit such a long and tedious tax-paying process. I mean, I'm quite sure our yearly income for the past decade wouldn't cover a down-payment for the cost of Melania's 25-carat rock, ...not to mention the half-a-million dollars a day of my tax money and yours that it takes to keep Donald Trump's family living in Trump Tower in the style to which they are accustomed instead of in the far less opulent First Family's wing of the White House. But then at least I know where a portion of our hard-earned money goes.
2 Comments
Mike
3/18/2018 04:28:54 pm
Having used it for the past several years I highly recommend the FreeTaxUSA.com on-line service. They prompt you at the beginning to purchase their full-featured version but let you use the free one through the entire process and it always accomplished everything I needed doing. BTW, I finished reading your book and liked it.
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Patti
3/18/2018 05:51:21 pm
Thanks for the info, Mike! And I'm glad you enjoyed the book! 8)
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"Equal And Opposite Reactions"
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