Tax season!
Apr. 13th, 2015 03:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutYeah, I know. Everyone reading this is going, but I filed mine in January. Well, good for you! You are a wonderful, hard working person and I'm glad you will have gotten all the way through the process in such an expeditious manner (<-- completely serious).
I am not asking for any sympathy when I note the following.
I did finally start entering data from pieces of paper and downloading electronic data into TurboTax today (my husband got around to this last Friday). Today, _after_ I got mostly through what I am able to do (my husband has the health insurance info, for example, and I am a little unclear on whether all the paperwork for the house property tax is in the folder), I received another envelope in the mail marked Important Tax Information Inside. It had a paper version of one of several incorrect forms I've received for a thing that ordinarily is quite well behaved and generates exactly one form that never needs to be changed, and gets it to me well before April 15. Fortunately, I _think_ I found the right number in one of the messages I received electronically. OTOH, I also got yet another electronic message from those good people this afternoon.
It doesn't really matter. I'm not gonna get final data from two other sources until late September (<-- wild optimism here) anyway, so I'll be filing for an extension with the rest of us schmucks. And it looks like the WAG (<-- wild ass guess) I put together a while back so I could make payments has largely turned out to be accurate. Hoodathunk?
I am not asking for any sympathy when I note the following.
I did finally start entering data from pieces of paper and downloading electronic data into TurboTax today (my husband got around to this last Friday). Today, _after_ I got mostly through what I am able to do (my husband has the health insurance info, for example, and I am a little unclear on whether all the paperwork for the house property tax is in the folder), I received another envelope in the mail marked Important Tax Information Inside. It had a paper version of one of several incorrect forms I've received for a thing that ordinarily is quite well behaved and generates exactly one form that never needs to be changed, and gets it to me well before April 15. Fortunately, I _think_ I found the right number in one of the messages I received electronically. OTOH, I also got yet another electronic message from those good people this afternoon.
It doesn't really matter. I'm not gonna get final data from two other sources until late September (<-- wild optimism here) anyway, so I'll be filing for an extension with the rest of us schmucks. And it looks like the WAG (<-- wild ass guess) I put together a while back so I could make payments has largely turned out to be accurate. Hoodathunk?
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no subject
Date: 2015-04-13 07:27 pm (UTC)silly Quartz piece on filing taxes
Date: 2015-04-14 01:07 am (UTC)Ohio State professor wrote this. And it is funny!
The argument is simple. Most people don't owe money or will get a refund (which he characterizes as "large" because it will be $3K). So they shouldn't procrastinate, but just get it done, thus ignoring a few realities for at least some schmucks like me.
(1) Still getting documents in the mail today, April 13th. Also, will not receive final versions of many documents until September or later.
(2) Nobody procrastinates on taxes because they are worried about paying. Everyone procrastinates because filing taxes = catching up on filing and then making phone calls or worse to collect the information you need to file. He thinks people avoid filing because they are afraid of being audited. Ha! People are likely much more afraid of screwing up and overpaying than they are of being audited.
(3) "Not surprisingly, there’s also a contingent of Americans who fill out their returns on their own and find the task daunting. The language is convoluted, the rules are Byzantine, and tax filing requires collecting many papers and forms that don’t all arrive at the same time. The process makes many people feel confused, stupid or inadequate." If this had been the central thesis of the piece, I would have enjoyed the article much more. And not laughed as much, so, you know, tradeoffs.
In any event, nowhere in the piece does he acknowledge that anyone who receives documents after April 15 has any motivation to be in a hurry to get their taxes done before April 15. Nowhere.