Taxes Suck!

I just finished filing our federal, state, and local income taxes for 2004. The process is such a pain. We got a pretty heft refund (Corbin was a huge benefit!), but it was still incredibly confusing to get filed. We had a lot of circumstances that muddied the water too. Jenn worked part of the year as a full-time employee, and part of the year as an independent contractor. As an independent contractor, we had to file the self employment forms. I have a health savings account through work, and evidently the IRS still isn't sure what forms they want you to file when you have one of those. It won't affect my return, as all of the contributions were from my employer and all of the disbursements were for qualified medical expenses, but it is still frustratingly difficult to understand how to fill out the various schedules and forms.

Starting this year, it is free to e-file your federal return. I chose to do mine through TurboTax. TurboTax was pretty good about walking me through the majority of the issues for my return, and getting all of the schedules properly filed. The only thing it didn't get quite right was the Health Savings Account, but I was able to go back and find that form later. The federal return was free, but I payed $19.95 to file the Indiana return. I could have filed the indiana return for free on the indiana site, but I've been sitting here for close to three hours answering tax questions. It was worth $20 not to have to do that again.

So we will hopefully find a nice refund deposit in our checking account soon. We can use that to fund Corbin's college fund for the year, and cushion our savings a bit more. I'm definitely going to have my exemptions increased at work though. I would much rather have a refund closer to zero dollars and be able to use that money throughout the year.