I finally put the finishing touches on my 2007 taxes.
Wow, what a nightmarish adventure of confusion and drudgery to navigate the labyrinthine tax system. For the past eight years I’ve been using software (first Turbo Tax and now TaxCut) because it’s worth the forty bucks to type in all the numbers have a program put it all together for me.
Of course I started back in January; it’s always good to get a good head of steam when you’re running the tax gauntlet. But it took a while to get all of the right paperwork from the various agencies that send that kind of paperwork, and of course it took a while to figure out all the numbers for my businesses and investments and whatnot. Every weekend I’d spend an hour or so crunching through the math, creating spreadsheets, entering numbers, and frowning at the result. I owe how much? And now it’s a week before they’re due, and I’m finally finishing everything and printing the 29 pages that I have to file with the IRS. (That’s not counting the 106 pages that TaxCut prints “for my records”, which apparently include all of the worksheets and calculations it did to come up with the 29 pages.)
In contrast, my friend Amanda had a different tax experience:
She got away with filing the legendary 1040-EZ form, which explains her all-too-chipper attitude. I remember that form from fifteen years ago… ahh, good times.