Doing Your Own Taxes

Basically if you are a single person with student loans and no mortgage, taxes are a breeze. Heck add on an IRA and they are still pretty darned easy.

When you have a blog business and a mortgage and significant things to keep track of, they are still easy. When you have multiple streams of income, that’s when it starts to get annoying for me.

J. Savings of Budgets Are S.e.x.y asked me if I sought help for doing my taxes or if I used a program.

Honestly, as long as you are organized, you don’t need help doing your taxes. I have used Turbo Tax in the past because I am a Quicken user, but I really didn’t like it. I felt like I had to hand-correct or override a great many things with the program. For 2007 taxes, I went back to spreadsheets and Quicken reports for filling out my taxes.

Caveat here is that I make a living writing accounting reports. I am used to looking at the world in monthly and quarterly statements, so I get a kick out of pulling reports for my personal expenses. The main thing is really how you categorize them throughout the year. I pulled my expenses and found that I was really lazy in making categories for myself. I don’t really have ‘Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge’ taxable income and expense categories set up, therefore, I had to comb through some of my other categories to get the right numbers.

If you can read, you can do your own taxes. The biggest annoyance for me was having to figure out if I owed AMT. Just doing an additional worksheet was irritating, but the IRS designs the tax forms to be simple word problems a 5th grader could do. “If this, then that”. The challenge is your judgement during the process. Is your home office deductible? What about your dinner bill when you meet a bunch of PF bloggers and talk shop? But don’t fret, the IRS offers you much guidance with Publications about taxes. And if you still can’t figure it out, then go ask a professional. But most of it is pretty straightforward.

PS - The final tally on taxes was ~$1481.00, or about $100 bucks plus change every month. Still not enough for me to feel comfortable adjusting my withholdings. Hooray for procrastination and putting an emphasis on my day job! (There is something else major that got in the way, but I’ll write about that later this week.)