Thursday, March 26, 2009

I fell in love again... with Turbotax!

Okay so I just have to share the news that I have been dreading doing our taxes for the first time ever this year. I was planning to do tons of research on it to teach myself about itemizing and all of the credits, etc. and then do all of the worksheets with paper and pencil and calculator. (This would involve lots of paper spread all over the floor, hair pulling, pen chewing, and frustrated moaning and groaning.) In the past we have had a professional tax preparer that Luke baptized on his mission doing it for a way discounted price, but last year he made us pay $150 without telling us so I decided I would do it this year. Well then I heard about "TURBOTAX" and it just replaced Luke as my new best friend. Although it took me 7 hours nonstop yesterday and I was a very boring mom (I put Gracie in her walker thing and fed her puffs for quite some time - or we could say I worked on her fine motor skills; then she watched an Einstein video that we checked out from the library), Turbotax took me through 350 deductions and helped me make informed decisions about everything which is really important for me to know why I am doing something. Then I e-filed and it only cost me $29.95. I got $21, 800 in deductions verses the standard deduction of like $10,500 for married filing jointly. Plus you gotta love the child credit!! (Karl and Megan figured this one out soon.) And now since we e-filed, it said we can expect to recieve our major, biggest ever tax return this Friday. We are going to put it toward's Luke's remaining school loan and some in savings. I might convince luke to let me buy some new shorts with it, maybe a high chair?, and maybe a used bike trailer if we can find one on craigslist. Oh and the new rug since our carpet remnant is so gross (got chocolate on it the other day). Probably not all of the above. I could think of lots of things to buy, that's easy, but we will probably just put the rest in savings after paying the loan. Oh and one more thing to top off how much I love turbotax, we got our place in FL rented. We had to give the month of April free, but who cares when we will have guaranteed year of payments for most of our mortgage. Wahoo! Don't you love/hate money? What are you going to do with your tax return?

1 comment:

The Rigbys said...

Clint has used Turbotax every year since we've been married. He loves it. That's cool that you figured it out on your own, I don't understand that stuff. We got $5,500 dollars back. Sweet huh? We used most of it to pay our debt off. We also bought an Xbox 360 for Clint and some flannel board stories for me to play with the girls. It was great!