Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Finished my taxes, Thank God

Doing taxes gets worse and worse, year by year.  Our friendly IRS keeps adding tax forms, Turbo Tax cranked out 32 pages of Federal income tax forms this year.  You can't just list stock sales on Schedule D anymore, they want half a dozen different forms, with different rules and gobble-de-gook for each form. 
   I don't understand why some presidential candidate doesn't promise to clean this up.  I know there are rabid special interests ready to leap to the defense of every loophole and deduction, but there gotta  be a lot of regular taxpayers who dread  doing all this scutwork every year. 
  I used to do my taxes with an Excel spreadsheet of my own construction.  But craziness connected with sale of foreign stocks is just to much for me, I can't write the spreadsheet when I don't under stand the rules.
There has gotta be a better way.
   The better way is Turbo Tax.  It's straight forward to use but you gotta watch it.  Accidentally hit a comma, when you meant to hit period for decimal point  can drive the program, and you crazy.  You want to double check this year vs last year, assuming  you used Turbotax last year.  Deductions you took last year you ought to be able to take this year. 

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