... and Taxes

I spent a good part of Friday doing income taxes. Last year I had my returns prepared by Liberty Tax Service. It was free with a first time customer coupon and extremely painless. After that experience I am determined to never do my taxes by hand-and-calculator again. Not only is doing taxes a pain, but taxes are an arithmetic test where any mistakes generally cost you large sums of money. Even small mistakes can add up with fees and penalties. I had the state of Pennsylvania go after me for fifty bucks once because I overpaid my taxes by 73 cents. I forgot to round all my numbers to the nearest dollar. I never did pay them.

This year I'm doing both our returns using TurboTax. So far I've only worked through our joint returns. I'm getting enough money back that my urge to see what happens when I file separately is fading. But I'm still going to try to run those numbers too just in case. Frankly, I'm a little suspicious of the amount I'm getting back. My Maryland return seems about right compared to last year, but my federal refund seems much larger. I'll have to print everything out and double check it.

Delaware is also annoying me since I'm filing a "combined" joint return. Whether we owe Delaware or Delaware owes us is entirely dependent on which column (mine or Amy's) I put our charitable deductions in. I don't pay taxes to Delaware either way because I have a big tax credit from Maryland, but Amybear has either under or overpaid. The problem is that all our contributions are in my name and many were made before we got married. I might be able to get away with giving them all to her, but I don't like to just "get away with" things. I want to do it right.

I think I'm going to redo the Delaware return after breaking our contributions down 50/50. Maybe she'll just break even, which is fine by me. I'm also going to try to work out a pure joint return and see if all of this clears up. For some reason Turbo Tax doesn't like giving me the option of changing the type of return I'm filing after I make the initial attempt. It's really kind of annoying actually.