I have people. Seriously, I have someone do them for me. The state stuff, and I pay 2 of them, is way too confusing for my mathematically challenged mind. H&R priced themselves out of my business years ago though. I use a private individual….one less thing to stress over.

I pay my tax guy, a friend of the family, to do them for me. Our federal taxes are beyond easy to do. Our state taxes are a nightmare. We live in IL, but neither of us pay state tax to IL and we don’t pay state taxes to the same state as the other one does. I can’t even begin to figure out how in the world that works out as far as taxes go. I tried once and it was mind numbing. $50 to my tax guy is a small price to pay to avoid the hassle.

I got the box!

It tells you what forms to include, and as long as you have your checkbook handy for itemizing, it takes a couple of hours to finish both state and federal for my business (sole proprietorship) and my family’s returns.

I’m with the “let somebody else deal with it” persuasion. I used to do my own–federal form was a breeze, state form a nightmare. I mean I could sit down with a pencil and paper and have the state tax actually figured out in no time, but trying to put everything into the boxes where it needed to be was another question. (You know, instructions like: If your exemption exceeds your waistline in centimeters on any even numbered year that the Groundhog has seen his shadow, please place the square root of the difference in box A. And I’m beating my head against the wall trying to figure out WHY box A even needed to have a figure in it since that figure was never going to tie into the computation anyway.) Finally one year I had a totally off the wall situation and I wanted to be sure that everything was filed properly. I’ve been using a tax preparer ever since.

I use the software and file electronically. Hopefully, with some luck, I will get back about 5% of what they took from me. That would mean that the government only took 1/3 of my income. I hope you senior enjoy your social security while it lasts, cause It won’t be around when I retire, even though I have been paying in for 20 years already. Nobody seems to seriously want to do anything about it, I guess they’ll just wait till it crashes and burns, that way no politician has to take the blame and loss of votes by doing what has to be done.

The hardest part is wading through the tax rules that were written by either a very confused, or a purposefully evil person(s). I once had a small mistake on one of my forms and got an IRS letter. Straightened that out and got another similar letter two years later. I had checked it over three times before I sent it and was glad to find it was an IRS mistake this time. Seems that particular part tripped THEM up that year. Their rep indicated they aren’t too pleased with the whole tax setup as it is either.
Any politician who doesn’t admit the tax code is bad simply because too many special interests have cobbled together a royal mess is tripping on an insanity pill. We need to simplify and get rid of special perks. True income levels should be the key. No more multi-million dollar corporation execs paying no taxes because their voodoo papers are rigged to do so. They say no one will take business risks if we do that. BULL! The wealthy have to eat too. Those who do it for other than the coin will still take risks, as all adventurers do. Too bad none of the give backs help us poor rehabbers are are trying to help abandoned hoods this year. Seems our small capital gains are being put on the same level as the wealthy’s corp capital gains without similar write-offs available. Uh…not the same thing fellows! Not by a long shot. May sanity return to the legislators this year. I think they need to realize the take it back by force if need be movement is growing. I heard yet another story of citizen abuse this morning when a homeowner whose home was stolen by eminent domain tried to remove belongings to donate to Habitat for Humanity. Seems his city officials took offense to this and wanted the belongings to be stolen or rot like the other homes in the area. Thanks to some press folks we hear about the large lawsuit they put on this homeowner. Intimidation because he has a bigger mouth than they would like. And of course the city officials would not talk to the press and preferred to shut their (no doubt heavily enforced) office door in the reporter’s face. Have we learned anything from last week? ENOUGH, or deal with the consequences.

H&R Block! 10 minute wait; 20 minute session, then I’m out the door.

They have done my taxes for the past 4 years. Great job. No hassles.

I’m happy.

I use TurboTax with State returns. It’s easy to use, finds all my deductions and files the returns electronically. The IRS usually deposits my return within a week, but the State refund usually takes much longer.

#5 -Larry, since you brought up SS taxes, I thought I would chime in. Few people know that SS is a “pay as you go system” - meaning it collects more money than it pays out. The extra money is put into a “trust fund” to be used when there are more people drawing SS than paying into it. Right now, the trust fund is valued at roughly 2.2 trillion ($2,200,000,000,000).

Here is the “funny” part – all that money was used to buy US Treasury bonds (Federal IOUs). There are no hard assets – all of the extra money was borrowed by the US Government, and spent. Considering the Government is already spending WAY more than it makes, it will be a dark day when SS stops paying Into the general budget, and instead starts taking dollars Out.

I use TurboTax Deluxe with State. I would make paying taxes very simple and it would be based only on final purchases where we pay state and local sales taxes now. For instance, if you make $50,000 a year, and don’t spend it, there are no taxes. Anything you would buy would have a, say, 20% flat tax on it, regardless of who you are. This way, it would be more difficult to hide income as whomever the final vendor is (like WalMart), they would have to pay the 20% tax they collected from you to the government.

Also, I would have a limited government as the US Constitution says which would allow us to lower tax rates even more later. Let the free market instead of the government decide how to allocate resources. This flat tax would eliminate all kinds of writeoffs and there would be no more TIF’s and government grants, only people keeping more of what they earn. Imagine how low unemployment would be and how everyone would actually be wealthier than now.

I just bite the bullet and go for it with plenty of coffee and a bad mood. I don’t trust that software. I have heard of too many folks audited after they used it. The sellers of that just want to make each of you think you are getting the largest deductions, no matter what the IRS will think of those liberties. The new “value your donations bull feature” is going to be the belated downfall of many.
Just don’t get into the IRS’s bad computer file. You will never get out of it witrhout paying ransom to the pale king’s peoples. I tried to dissolve a small biz I started that was not going to make the kind of money I expected. The IRS insisted I file each quarter just putting zeros in the blanks. After three years of this I asked why I was not allowed to dissolve the business and quit wasting everybody’s time. Mind you, the biz earned NOTHING…EVER. Maybe I should have filed as a corporation! I visited several IRS offices, then finally quit filing the zero filled sheets. An agent who had his stuff together finally visited me at my home (what a surprise) and said he would take care of it. he did, and I am sailing along with a somewhat profitable business. it was obvious no one at the IRS knew how to “officially snuff out” my dead, pitiful biz.