A of everything, get off my case about leaving stuff until the last minute or getting an accountant, I’ve got everything as handled as it needs to be. But more to the point: I cannot be the last person who writes out her taxes by hands and mails them in via actual mail, can I? Because, yes, the Internet, but counterpoint: THEY MAKE IT HARD AS NERF BALLS TO DO YOUR TAXES ON THE INTERNET. You have to get a code or whatever and they make you remember what you paid in taxes last year, which, why would I remember that, I mailed you all of my taxes last year, you’re the ones with all the information.
“Oh, you have to save your taxes somehow, you have to keep them in a file cabinet even though you already mailed them away to the government and have no way of doing so!” Absolutely not. It is enough to ask that I complete both federal and state taxes every year to the best of my knowledge and ability; it is a bridge entirely too far to ask me to write down how much money I mailed to them.
It’s just nicer, by hand! I can do my own math and take my own time and I don’t have to remember another password and sometimes the IRS website doesn’t have the files I need and the walk to the post office does me good, probably.
Tags: advice, don’t give me advice, money, remembering things, taxes
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Don’t think about this at all for the next 360+ days.
I do them by hand as well, Mallory!
Although, you can just save a copy of the pdf before you print it and mail it to the government. This is helpful for the next year, when you’re filling out the forms, you can just look and see what boxes you left empty last year. That way you don’t waste future time learning what tax words mean because you spent past time figuring out which ones don’t apply to you.
what PDF? I’M WRITING THEM OUT BY HAND, I PICK UP THE COPIES AT THE LIBRARY OR THE POST OFFICE
With like, a pencil?
they give you paper copies at the library???
damn strait they do!
they might run out, but then they can just print more.
Me too! For all of the same reasons. The free online forms are awful and I learned to do them on paper and it’s just EASIER.
This year I did them MORE THAN A WEEK AHEAD OF TIME I’m so proud.
Sorry, Boo. Even my 76 year old dad does his taxes online.
You’re not the only person not filing online, but you’re one of a dying breed.
http://www.irs.gov/uac/SOI-Tax-Stats-IRS-Data-Boo…
I did them by hand too (am in the UK though so don’t have to do them anymore now I’m no longer a freelancer) as agree about the whole getting a code to log in to the website thing. I also went and paid my taxes by hand too, with a cheque, once I posted my forms off and they told me how much to pay. The lady at the bank seemed super surprised. “You can do this online!” “BUT YOU HAVE TO GET A COOOODDEEEE”.
My feelings exactly.
and the code generator thingie doesn’t always work. i do married filing jointly, so I need TWO codes, and of course it usually works for me and almost never works for my husband and who has any idea why. ugh.
that said i do just use our AGI from last year instead of the code and that works fine.
“You have to get a code or whatever and they make you remember what you paid in taxes last year, which, why would I remember that, I mailed you all of my taxes last year, you’re the ones with all the information.”
Why do you need to know what you paid last year? I just did mine on TurboTax, and I didn’t need that.
But I sympathize with your luddite ways. I am probably the last person in the world who just types twitter.com/mallelis into my web browser to read funny jokes, rather than just getting a dang Twitter account.
If you used TurboTax last year, it might have remembered that for you and just filled it in. I remember having to dig it out the first time I used it, but not since.
H&R Block does this as well. I’ve e-filed through them for about a decade and it remembers EVERYTHING.
Me too, but I am thoroughly out of charity with them this year after they made me input all my payment information, like, 600 times so I could e-file my freaking state return.
I mean, it’s bad enough that you have to pay to e-file your state return, but at least they could make it EASY, you know?
The one thing TurboTax won’t remember for me is how much I paid for freakin’ TurboTax last year. GET IT TOGETHER TT
Yes, this is UNACCEPTABLE.
I did use it last year, but then they were trying to charge me for filling in my old info, and I didn’t pay. I just don’t remember ever being asked my 2013 income, but it’s definitely possible that I did fill that in and then forgot.
There was a big article in the NY Times the other day about how TurboTax is Evil and Stuff:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/technology/pers…
Oh, that’s fascinating. My taxes are always super super straightforward, so this all seems very reasonable to me.
Oh yeah, they’re awful. But quite convenient, and my taxes aren’t complicated enough to futz around with a real accountant. When they do get that complicated, I’ll drop TurboTax like a bad habit.
I hate turbo tax now. I used them last year and it cost 56 dollars. This year they wanted 94 for the same service? I used them to calculate everything and then copied the numbers into the free efile site. We shouldn’t have to pay to pay our taxes.
That’s what I do, too!
i’ve never had to pay to use Turbo Tax but my taxes are really straightforward so *shrug*. do my taxes online for free from my couch in my PJs? yes, please.
sucks that they’re such big jerkity jerks. that return-free filing thing sounds awesome.
twitter.com/mallelis/with_replies is one of my favorite Internet Websites.
twitter.com/Nicole_Cliffe/with_replies also a great Site on the Internet.
I just like typing things ok
Oh yeah, gotta go /with_replies. How else will you know who Mallory is deftly cutting off at the knees by replying “okay” to their carefully-edited, multiple-tweet critiques?
I did them by hand, as well. Until I the year I had three state returns. And I became old enough to have a spouse with inheritance issues after a parent’s death. Only a small amount of money, but fuck if I could figure out what the IRS wanted me to do about it. Then when there was more inherited-but-delayed pittance trickling in the following year, from the same death, I gave up and called a CPA. She nudges me annually, so I’ve been handing everything to her every since.
Yeah, we use a CPA because we inherited a house and sold it at a loss and that is a VERY SMALL COMPLICATION, in the grand scheme of things, but it was the last little bit that made it Too Complicated For Us. The straw that broke the 1040-EZ’s back.
how did you find your CPA? word of mouth, or is there some kind of listing/review system one can use?
(many thanks in advance if you reply – this is giving me all sorts of difficulty!)
So happy to receive your personal response! So disappointed that I cannot help you: my CPA is my aunt. And she is not taking new clients. I know I can trust her, but I also have to put up with her loving comments. “Are you sure you two are putting enough into savings?”
A CPA is like a doctor, in that they passed a grueling exam to prove intelligence and depth of knowledge, they take annual continuing education courses to keep their certification, and they answer to a licensing board, so anyone with certification is likely a safe bet. CPAs are governed by federal laws specific to them and their duty to their clients. Any CPA is better than the average uncredentialed tax preparer.
The only variable I can think of is technology. An experienced CPA is desirable, if you have unusual tax issues. My aunt loves me enough to do the research every time we move and have a new state return to deal with.
But an experienced CPA did not grow up using computers and is likely new to the internet. The IRS has taken steps that all but require CPAs to file electronically, so the older ones are forced to learn at least a little.
How important is it for you to be able to send your CPA your scanned W2s, etc? For example, I have had middle-aged mortgage loan officers call me to say they “cannot open” my attachments, when what it really means is they don’t fully understand email. I hand-deliver hard copy to those people because I need something from them. Are you prepared to print and hand-deliver? Then any CPA will do.
I pay H&R Block extra to remember all of last year’s information for me. I know it is a ripoff and yet I will pay whatever they ask to avoid having to look up that stupid IRS number thing for myself AGAIN.
I feel like that changed this year, though! Because I have never paid for federal filing with H&R, but I remember it always filling stuff like last year’s income and my PIN in for me, but maybe I am making things up oh well
I definitely paid them for *something,* I am still pretty new to preparing my own taxes and it’s totally possible I spent money on a service I didn’t actually need. The website made it look like it wouldn’t remember my information unless I paid up.
They always charge to do state filings (grumble grumble) but I could swear that last year, the free federal version plugged in all the relevant information.
For Federal, I used H&R Block’s free efile for the modestly-incomed last year and this, and yeah, it didn’t demand any pins, and it remembered lots of stuff from last year that I didn’t have to fill in again. It was very easy.
I used Illinois’s free online website, which is an uglier design than last year but still did work.
I think if you just go to H&R Block and log in it will assume that you are paying them, but if you go via the IRS website with links to the free online options it will let you do it for free.
I learned that last year after going to the H&R Block website, entering everything, being told how much it would cost, saying hell no, and then going via the IRS website and entering everything all over again. Thankfully I remembered what had happened when I did my taxes this year, and it worked again!
My husband does our taxes by hand every year. He likes to imagine that there is a special agent assigned to do his special by hand form. He has an MBA in Finance and says it’s fun .
Tax season is one that turns me into a Slate-level crotchety-pants.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2…
I am annoyed because I am poor enough to use online federal tax prep software for free (Turbotax etc.), except that this past year I was paid to work for a film festival I usually volunteer for, and did not get a W2 for the event where they paid me enough to warrant a W2, and then the other one paid less than $200 (one-day event) and so I’m on the hook for the paperwork for that one. But Turbotax goes “that’s too complicated, you have to pay to do that shit” so I just didn’t report that income. (It would have made zero difference in refund, if the IRS super wants to audit me over less than $1000 they can go ahead and have a party. Technically I make so little that I don’t actually have to file at all, but if I don’t file I don’t get a refund and my refund is *larger* than my withholdings, so I file.)
On the other hand there is something messed the fuck up with my fiancé’s taxes (and he pays a tax preparer!), because his effective tax rate is for a full tax bracket above his income, what the fuck?
But Mallory, to do them by hand I would have to sit at a table or a desk or someplace else I could write on, instead of in my bed, which is the only usable piece of furniture in my room (the rest being covered in Stuff). And if I do them online, I can fill them out halfway from home, and then finish from the office. And I don’t have to worry about losing the paper work, and I can save the PDF to a folder on my machine, or to my google drive, and that is one less piece of paper to keep track of.
I am a procrastinator by nature, but I like to do my taxes ASAP because I am always afraid that I will lose a W2 (I have two jobs) or something important if I wait.
i’m always fascinated by you, mallory ortberg, because sometimes I say “oh that Mallory, she sure is part of such a hip new breed of young internet writers, one who could only exist in the current era!” and then other times I say “wow, that Mallory is the OLDEST PERSON ON THE PLANET.”
If I were creating a character named Mallory Ortberg, this is the kind of quirk I would give her. To make her well-rounded and contradictory. 😀
TAXES SHOULD NOT BE SO COMPLICATED THAT THE AVERAGE CITIZEN CANNOT DO THEM, FLAT TAX
IMO the complicated part isn’t the marginal rates (everyone just looks it up in a tax table anyway), it’s all the adjustments to income, deductions, exemptions, etc. And it seems like you could easily simplify that side of things without losing the progressivity of tax brackets. Ayn Rand is one thing, but a flat tax… /shudders
You have to look the rates up? That seems overly complicated. In the Canadian tax form, there’s about five different columns for the actual tax calculation, and you pick the one that matches your tax bracket, and just follow the instructions there. (Or at least that’s how it worked last time I did them by hand, which was not that long ago.)
Do you have too many brackets for that? Do they make your forms more complicated on purpose? I’ve heard that US taxes are more complicated, but I don’t know the details.
It’s actually both simpler and weirder than that, if that makes sense — you start by taking all your exemptions and deductions (e.g. children, mortgage and student loan interest, solar panel credits, and so on) to arrive at an “adjusted income” number, which is the amount that you’re actually taxed. Instead of looking up brackets or calculating rates manually, there’s a big multi-page table in the back of the instructions that lists a dollar amount of taxes corresponding to every income amount (to the nearest $50).
So in this year’s edition (http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040a.pdf, pp. 61-72), if your adjusted income is $44,210, you owe $6,913 in taxes — the actual marginal rates you’re paying on the income isn’t included in the same publication at all.
Oh wow that’s weird. But simple, it’s true.
We do have deductions and stuff, it’s the adjusted income that you do the final calculation on. We don’t have different tax rates for single/married/whatever, so that’s another bit where yours are more complicated, I guess.
Another bit that I always forget is simpler here is that most of the provinces have agreements with the federal tax people so that the federal tax people handle the paperwork and collecting for provincial taxes. There’s still a separate form, but it’s short and it gets submitted together with the federal form. Or at least it’s short for Alberta, which is a province that is run by vaguely small government types, so that might not carry over to the whole country.
Plus there’s the ticky box on the federal taxes for letting them share your info with the elections people so they can update your voter registration without you doing anything, which I don’t think you have either. Basically US taxes make me appreciate Canadian taxes a whole bunch.
I always think this, but then I think how many different scenarios you need to account for (if “you” are the federal government trying to tax all income levels & varieties of taxable things), and how much legal precedent probably screws things up, and I realize that if I was in charge of making the tax code (which, heaven forfend) it would probably be just as effed.
(Though I’d tax the wealthy much more.)
Amen sister. This year’s instructions were an inch thick when I printed them out.
I also do my taxes by hand every year. It gives me a sense of control, and of going at my own pace. I’m also careful with my personal data and feel nervous about transmitting it electronically, even though the government routinely does it on my behalf.
What the hell are y’all even talking about. I used TaxAct – it remembered everything from last year and took like 10 minutes. Federal was free, I think it cost me $12 to file state taxes.
My first year out of college, my dad handed me all my W-whatevers and was like, “You’re an adult, here you go.” I had to file for 4 jobs in 2 different states, including a freelancer form, plus student loans and investment stuff. It was a nightmare and I nearly cried.
HRBLOCK (or turbotax, they are essentially the same) DOT COM. IT IS FREE TO EFILE FEDERALLY AND IT MIGHT EVEN HAVE WEIRD WAYS TO IMPORT UR W2 AND IT DOES ALL THE MATH FOR U AND U JUST SAVE A PDF OF UR RETURN AT THE END
remembering a password is tough though, i’ll give u that.
I DON’T WANT SOME THIRD PARTY KNOWING MY TAX INFORMATION AND ALSO I DO NOT TRUST THEM
once I went to H&R Block and they told me I owed DOUBLE what I owed when I did it by hand, SO
last year I started my taxes at hrblock.com and my refund came to $9 and I was like “what the fuck is this, everyone else gets like $900” so I went to turbotax.com and did it again and it was still $9 🙁 this very scientific process has given me faith in all the internet tax maths. I am extremely trusting where it means I don’t have to do things/find a pen.
H&R Block charged me to e-file federally this year, I was very upset. But it was still less than my return so I sucked it up. I have very simple taxes and have only used them once before, is this a new thing or did I accidentally do something wrong?
It’s only free if your income is below a certain amount – generally $60K but it looks like the H&R Block cutoff is lower for some reason.
Here’s the list of free file providers & their criteria:http://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/jsp/index.jsp
Oh bummer! I’ve used hrblock for years and it’s never charged me, but I guess I am too broke for the cutoff 🙁
I think you also have to go to their site via the IRS free file site prost linked to; if you just type in their website they assume that they can charge you even if your income qualifies.
Doing them by hand is ridiculous and Turbotax is inanely fast and efficient, but the only argument for doing them by hand is that every year, Turbotax apparently hires a special team to make the system condescend to you EVEN MORE. This year it literally started with “HI THERE! How are you feeling about doing your taxes?” and you had to select the emoji that matched your mood.
Oh for fuck’s sake.
I think that is what I said out loud verbatim when I read that. It also continued to chat irritatingly at me. “New York! We’re in Texas BTW”. Like hello I am doing my taxes online to avoid human interaction,do you really think that people miss the vapid small talk involved in getting their taxes done?
That and the constant, increasingly desperate efforts to get you to upgrade to the $29.99 version is pretty infuriating, but still. . .by hand is insane.
I think I just spluttered with rage.
Oh man, and they very nearly suckered me into paying $30 or something for the “convenience” of having their fee deducted from my refund. Sneaky buggers.
Me too! They added a thing this year where they were like ‘but it’s not a real cost because we’ll deduct it from your taxes!’ Which. . .I’m pretty sure had to be bullshit. Because otherwise that would just be free (and in the past it was).
The thing at the beginning where they go “Do you want to DELETE LAST YEAR’S INFO AND START FROM SCRATCH or pay us $29.99” is so infuriating, because it makes you all nervous that you’re putting yourself in for hours of work, but it turns out you just have to type in your name and address again.
Right, they make it sound like it’s a huge deal, but then it’s really easy! They’re just trying to trick you every step of the way, which is definitely annoying.
Oh yes, it was *lovely* how this year they walked me through my state return (and I thought, oh, how nice, they’ve stopped charging extra for that!) and THEN said “BTDUBS if you don’t want us to DELETE IT ALL you have to pay”.
Oh wow you know, I didn’t even notice that they didn’t warn you beforehand this year! Because I’m used to them charging for the state return and I figured I could afford it because my federal refund was pretty big. What assholes.
Yeah, I’m used to them charging, and I am using a free service because I HAVE NO MONEY, and am used to just downloading the PDF of my federal return and using that to fill out my state’s free e-file forms, so I was pleased and then super pissed about the wasted time.
For various reasons, this was my very first year doing my own taxes, and I… actually thought that was cute. It made me a little bit happy.
. . .you might be about 1000% less bitter of a person than I am and that is probably a good thing.
Oh man, even if I had previously been super enthused about doing my taxes, that would pretty rapidly make me want to burn everything down.
I do not file mine online because you can’t just file through irs.gov, they’re all like “PICK ONE OF THESE ELEVENTY BILLION PRIVATE PARTNER WEBSITES” and I’m like no, fuck that noise.
Click the HR Block one. It’s easy!
thank goodness for no more questions about whether the library has the tax booklets please. I can not control whether we do or not and we even put together a book that could be checked out with all the instructions!
I did my federal taxes by hand and my state online (don’t ask why, it was silly) and I can speak to the merits of both – on the one hand, mailing stuff is a pain, on the other yeah you have to have a code or to remember what you paid last year. I had to go online and into my bank statements from April 2014 to see what size of check the Commonwealth of Massachusetts cashed way back when – it worked though! And it took like 15 minutes for me to file online once I did that.
Doing your taxes by hand these days is like saying you will only write on a typewriter or code via Notepad. OK dude, right on, but you know you’re just making things unnecessarily hard on yourself, right?
I DO NOT BELIEVE THAT FOR A SECOND
On the other hand I kind of miss the pen-and-paper satisfaction of filling out the form. It was like when you would get in a good groove in your math homework and were like “YES I KNOW THIS AND THEN THAT MEANS THAT THIS IS THAT AND DONE CHECKMARK GIVE ME AN A”
But yeah I want my refund back asap and the online is super efficient.
But what if you never get a refund? I would probably file online if I ever made money, but I like that someone has to open an envelope to take my check.
In past years I owed. This is the first year in the past four or five that I’m getting money back. And I did the forms online and mailed a check, I just didn’t have to mail the forms in. I think HRBlock made me print a payment coupon or something to go with the check.
I don’t miss the part where I would invariably screw up on my first run-through, and it would say I owed a zillion dollars, and then I would have a panic attack and be on the verge of tears before figuring out my error.
my first time through it said i was getting $9,147 back. no fucking way is THAT correct. it would be nice but no *start over*
So right. Coding in ViM is obvs better.
A self-evident truth.
I did mine by hand for years – the local Canada Revenue Agency is just a few blocks away so it was pleasant to stroll over, dump the package in their bin, and rejoice over saving the cost of a stamp – but then there was a thing with stock options, then CRA quit mailing tax packages out automatically, so I thought I’d give online filing a whirl.
True fact: I picked SimpleTax because it was the only free registered software that didn’t look like it was designed by people who’d gotten the boot from GeoCities for being too ornate. And I’ve stuck with it because it takes me about 5 minutes start to finish and another 5 to double check. That said, my finances are the uncomplicated finances of a healthy, contented spinster, so whatever floats your fiscal boat.
SimpleTax is so good. I used to use CuteTax, which changed its name to something else, and SimpleTax is so much nicer. My mom is using it too, now. My taxes are not very complicated, but I still have donation receipts and student loan interest credit and stuff like that, and SimpleTax handles all the little pieces of paper so well.
I should really do my taxes soon, I haven’t even been good about keeping the forms and stuff in one place this year. But I still have two weeks, and like you said, it will take about ten minutes total. Once I find the stuff.
I did do them by hand the first few times, and also once or twice when I couldn’t submit them online because I was late. I know it’s not that hard, but online is so much easier.
YES to that graphic, that is exactly the Simpsons episode that was in my head when I rolled up to the post office yesterday at 4:45 pm with all the other last-minute dumb-dumbs to mail my taxes. “How many children do we have, Marge? No time to count – let’s estimate! 7!”
Maggie is five people.
I have done mine by hand before, and it was OK. I did them online this year, and it was OK, save for the part where it tried to cheat me out of my HSA deduction.
But the best of all was last year, where I went *in* to H&R Block, sat with a tax dude, he showed me all of the things on my unnecessarily complicated tax forms (W-2 income, 1099 income, unemployment income, federal, state, and local taxes, and so on and so forth) and how much I needed to pay, and then was like, “Well, it’ll be ELEVENTY BILLION DOLLARS for me to file them for you from here, or you can just take all the information I’ve given you and file them yourself at home for free.” WHAT. I had no idea that was a thing you could do. Totally allowed.
I mean, I felt bad about wasting his time, but he was all Ben Wyatt-y about it and was like, “No problem at all! I love doing this stuff!”
I think a lot of the in-person tax-prep companies just hire people for the season and most of those people just kind of… really like doing taxes.
“Ben Wyatt-y” <3 <3 <3
I used to do my taxes by hand because I am a cheap motherfucker. Plus it was fun. Like doing Sudoku.
Now I live with someone who always gets Turbo Tax, so I just actually play Sudoku instead.
I had 3 W-2s this year thanks to part time gigs and finally getting my full time job. The second I had all my W-2s and the forms I needed, I took care of taxes. Hell no was I going to risk loosing all that. Nope.
Ditto. The only thing I had to think about was my HSA stuff and the bank sent me that, so yay.
I did delay filing/etc my state return this year but only because I owed. >:(
Oh OH, I’m a dirtbag who still allows her sainted father to handle her household taxes. HE IS INCREDIBLY GENEROUS SO TO DO, I know, and also he will live forever so I don’t have to ever learn to do it myself. But also Mr. Singstrix and I had something like four W2s and 5+ 1099s between us and that is just too many papers??
My sainted father also does my taxes, and I don’t even have an excuse as I only have one job that conveniently comes with a W-2 and no spouse or anything. Every April he makes noise about this being The Last Time and then a year later he just calls and asks me to send him any paperwork I have and then a few weeks later I magically get a refund, and really this setup is working out so well for me that I’m not going to question anything about it, ever.
I at least do the legwork of collecting all possible deduction numbers (which is INCREDIBLY fiddly and I’m terribly impressed with my own recordkeeping when I’m able to produce them), since my dad is a very particular gent, and likes to run all the numbers “just in case” (har har) they outweigh the standard deduction. PRO TIP they never do
I am fairly certain my father still does taxes for my brother and sister just as he does for me. We are all in the age bracket of 25-30 but he has never complained and we all like not having to do them so.
I work for a government consulting firm, and when I had to go into New Employee Indoctrination and Reeducation for my first week, the main Government Consulting Success Story they had us use as a case study was a point at which the IRS hired us to try to figure out how to make people electronically file taxes online because it is a bajillion times cheaper for the government than processing paperwork. So, on the one hand, by filing taxes by hand you are contributing to higher costs for the IRS and therefore the need for more taxes; on the other hand, hey, employment for IRS workers! Hooray. Rage against the machine, Mallory.
I AM VINDICATED. I have always done my taxes by hand and the one time I tried to do it with software left me nearly throwing my computer out the window in anger. Everyone thinks I’m a Luddite but it is SO SATISFYING to have columns of numbers all totted up.
I find it charming that you pick up paper copies at the library and every year replicate Homer Simpson’s version of doing taxes. I will enjoy your live tweeting of this event for years to come.
I’ll just say… If you are considered un-marriageable by Jane Austen standards (make < $60k), you can use online free file. No need to remember anything except your email address. Perfect for us irresponsible self-employed types who do taxes < 1 day before they’re due.
ICYMI, here’s John Oliver talking about the IRS with bonus Michael Bolton singing about the IRS! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn_Zln_4pA8
I did my taxes by hand (and enjoyed it!) until I suffered through tax season after an interstate move. Filling out 2 state returns would not be that hard if they would just TELL YOU how to do it! But it was impossible. I turned to TurboTax that year and never looked back. Then I got married and now we use my in-laws’ accountant, who has done taxes for 3 generations of my husband’s family. He costs more than H&R Block but it’s worth it because he knows everything and also sends us a Christmas card every year.
When I was a young boy in this country we used to build things by hand. All these kids these days with their newfangled computers and internet destroying our way of life.
I use TurboTax, and actually, that was the easiest part of doing taxes. The hardest was EVERYTHING ELSE which seems to be set up for you to fail at taxes. Why does my bank have until March 31 to mail me the forms I need? I don’t want to wait until the last minute! And why don’t they give a list of all the forms they will be mailing me so that on April 8 I won’t decide “this is probably all of them, right?” and then file my taxes and then get another form on the 10th and have to figure out how not to have the CRA arrest me or something for not having claimed the $152 fucking investment income?
AND THEN the CRA has my old address on file, and apparently I have to have changed it to the new one before I can file, which requires me to make an online account with them which needs to be “verified” with a random line amount from last years’ filing so I have to find THAT and it tells me that to change my address I’m going to need a code that they will mail to my old mailing address. What if I didn’t have access to that mailbox anymore, CRA? How the fuck is this a good idea? HOW CAN THIS POSSIBLY BE SO POORLY DESIGNED?
Do you not have recent student loans? By the time I broke down and did the online CRA account thing, I had used the National Student Loan Service Bureau’s website several times, so I already knew to expect any government web site account to be terrible.
Which is to say yes, the CRA online accounts are terrible.
Good point. I don’t know why I expected this to be any better.
I believe that you only need to change your address ahead of time if you want to Netfile. A couple of years ago, our changed information was complicated enough that we just mailed in our taxes.
(I’m so glad that my bank is a sign-in partner with the CRA! My brother’s bank isn’t, and he’s stuck in a loop of “In order to sign in, you need line x from form y” “But I need to log in to get that line!”)
My bank is a sign-in partner too! But then the CRA said I had to verify it to connect the bank account with the CRA account which completely negates the purpose of a sign-in partner as far as I can tell
Oh man, I forgot about the mailed-out confirmation code! The worst!
I’m simultaneously glad that the CRA has so many protections in place that Canada didn’t have the big QuickTax fraud problem that the US had, but so annoyed that it’s so hard to log in and change one’s address.
Edit: Nevermind, missed your reference to CRA. Reading comprehension fail on my part]. If you are in the US, your bank does not have until March 31 to send you the forms. They are supposed to get those out in February (2nd or 17th, depending on the form). Unfortunately, only the IRS can really go after them for a penalty for late reporting.
Yeah, I am jealous of Americans who get to file early (or, I guess, people without mutual fund investments) because Canada for some reason has a Feb deadline for all but one type of form just to screw with everyone’s heads.
The last time I did my taxes by hand I made a mistake and the IRS sent me a letter which made my heart stop. It was a really nice letter- it basically said “you made a mistake, please fix it and don’t freak out because this is normal and okay.” And then I messed it up again and they sent me another letter which said “you seem to be unable to do math so we’ve fixed it for you – you owe us $XX please send a check. And don’t freak out it’s still okay.” I never want to go through that again even though it was about as pain-free as a process can be.
There was an exciting time when I was filing taxes in two countries and got them both wrong. Both tax agencies were very nice about it!
My dad’s favorite tax story is the time that he (also a do-it-by-hand guy) got a letter from the IRS informing him that he had made a mistake, and he owed them an additional $XX. He was OUTRAGED. How dare they suggest that he, A GENIUS, had made a simple math error? How dare they! Then he noticed that he had also made a reading comprehension error, and that in fact the letter said that THEY owed HIM $XX and he would be receiving a check shortly. He tells this story anytime anyone mentions taxes. Possibly this belongs on the Dad Magazine thread, actually.
I also did them by hand!!! Because I am a simple person, monetarily–one W2, no spouse, no dependents, no capital gains from investments, one IRA–it was SIMPLE AS HELL and I did them, fed and state both, in under an hour. I can see how anyone freelancing, with a lot of stocks, or kids etc would immediately get way more confusing. But it doesn’t feel “real” to me to press a button and file online–I want to hand those envelopes to my postal person and see that shit get sent away.
NY State set up a site to allow direct state e-file this year and I did it and the site worked perfectly and it made me feel less despair about our government for five minutes.
That said I kind of miss manually looking up how much I owed in the tax tables.
That was my exact reaction to the new NY State setup! I am all for filing online but I’m damned if I’m giving any money to third party for-profit leeches when my taxes are as easy as they could possibly be, so I mailed in the federal forms as usual.
I do like how the 1040 instructions have little charts explaining the previous year’s revenues & outlays and how the federal budgeting process works.
I always run them through Tax Act and TurboTax and pick whichever one comes out as less (I always owe—long story). TaxAct has been cheaper every time. The tool is slightly harder to use than TT, but if it continues to save me $300 every year, I’m willing to be mildly irritated. (Their fees are generally lower than TT too.)
I… mail my taxes by hand? Because they charge $20 to file online! Even with insurance and tracking and super fast delivery, it’s like $5.
Ugh I had to file in 3 STATES this year, though, so it was like $15 of postage.
Really, doing your taxes by hand is more patriotic, because you have to use the post office. So I assume the IRS looks more leniently upon things sent through the mail.
I feel for you folks that have to do state taxes. My brother lived in California for a long time and went on and on and on about how terrible they are.
Washington state doesn’t have them. “It appears your state of residence does not have a state tax. Click Next to proceed to final stage of filing.” I always love getting to that point with TurboTax.
My second-greatest regret about moving to Oregon.
State *and* local for me. And I don’t even live in a city that has local taxes. But I work in one. No e-file, and the “fillable” pdf they provide cannot be saved with the filled fields. Obnoxious!
I tried to do my taxes by hand once and ended up determining that I owed the government $6000. I did not have $6000. After freaking out I sent my papers to my dad and he re-did them in Turbotax and got me a refund and I just about cried. He now makes me do them myself, but he buys a multi-person Turbotax deal and lets me use that and it has worked out ok so far.
I stubbornly print out the 1040s every year and mail everything in dead-tree format. At this point I actively resist any online activity that requires me to generate YET ANOTHER PASSWORD and receive YET MORE EMAILS.
“don’t give me advice”
……………………okay.
(but tell the post office to stop sending people to the library, we don’t have the forms either)
You’re not the only one by a long shot, because I work at a library and there are 1,543,009 people (approx.) in here all day yelling at us because we no longer have piles of the forms, schedules, and instruction books to hand out to people for free. The IRS stopped printing and sending those out to libraries and post offices when their budget got slashed.
You may, however, be the only one left doing them by hand who is under 65.
I also feel compelled to tell my two state/local tax horror stories (though one is considerably less horrible than the other).
First, I once received a notice from the city in which I grew up, stating that I had failed to file taxes and therefore owed a $300 late fee. The problem was that it was for a year I didn’t live in that city, and also didn’t make any income, and therefore would have been a $0 tax bill, even if I *had* needed to file. Fortunately, being my hometown, I knew someone in the tax office, they agreed it was stupid, and they wiped the record out of the system. Easy peasy.
Then, later on, I moved between states and failed to file for the city I had moved out of. I had worked there for a few months before leaving part-way through the year, and owed something like $20 in local taxes, and didn’t realize or file. Two years later, after they had sent letters to my childhood home (where I hadn’t lived for 5+ years) for two years, they finally got in touch with me to tell me I owed $300+ and was being turned over to a collections agency. Even though I would have been happy to collect the paperwork to show that I hadn’t lived there all year, and pay what I owed, the collection agency was (predictably) like, “Pay up by tomorrow or we’re taking you to court and torching your credit rating.” Bastards.
tl;dr – Taxes are dumb. So am I.
Your story is horrifying — it’s like the nightmare where you have an exam you didn’t prepare from and you owe a lot of money and you forgot to put on pants this morning and THE GOVERNMENT IS AFTER YOU.
I have some sort of PTSD from 5 years of hand-completing and filing tax forms in Japanese when I lived in Japan and worked as a contractor for different companies. I speak Japanese but cannot read it well, especially specialized kanji like tax form language. I would do my best to fill them out by hand, then take them in to the local tax office about three months past the deadline, when everyone there had not much to do (I hope) and I would sit down next to a very patient local tax official who would go through and show me how I had written the wrong thing on every line. It took about three years for me not to burst into tears immediately upon arriving back home after that ordeal. But I always got money back, so there was a bright side.
Anyway now I live in the US but still work for Japanese companies and it is all still a nightmare so I pay a woman to do my taxes even though I really can’t afford it.
I only started doing efile when I became self employed and it became Too Many Atachments, and every year I get annoyed that I have to look up what I paid last year when it should remember that for me. On the other hand, I should probably be paying taxes quarterly, but instead I can never pay by April 15 and just file and never file for an extension and I don’t end up paying them off until about October. My friend is aghast but honestly, I make so little money and most of it is in cash and I feel like the IRS is just like, look, we appreciate that you even bother, really.
Also I have to add, my son got his first job last year and this year I taught him how to do his taxes, on paper and by mail.
I do ’em by hand because I live abroad and the online submission thing won’t accept my overseas address.
Am I the only person in the country who uses Free Tax USA? It costs $12.95 and I assume it’s just as good as Turbo Tax. I always get a healthy return. Why the Turbo Tax hegemony? Also may I add I like to think of taxes as “America’s homework.”
“Well, calc you later!”
I am so glad that I am a minor and have no jobs because this tax stuff sounds scary as shit and why on earth do forms have names??? What does the ‘W’ in ‘W2’ mean? Why do we have to pay state AND federal taxes? brb never growing up
That's what I do, too!
Oh my god I can’t believe how complicated US taxes sound!
In Australia we do ours after the end of the financial year (so you have from July until October) and there’s only federal taxes to worry about (unless maybe you have a business? I dunno), and the govt provides the e-tax program which you download for free and then you get the program to pre-fill all your information from the last year and it’s connected to practically every govt agency and even pre-fills my income and income tax, so the only thing I have to enter is my interest from my shares (which I copy off the form the company sends me), make up a couple of deductions and done!
After we have this kid in August it might be little more complicated because we get family tax deductions of some sort, so I might get my husband’s accountant to do all our taxes, but even then it’s worth it because you can claim the accountant’s fee as a tax deduction!
Oh my god I can't believe how complicated US taxes sound!
In Australia we do ours after the end of the financial year (so you have from July until October) and there's only federal taxes to worry about (unless maybe you have a business? I dunno), and the govt provides the e-tax program which you download for free and then you get the program to pre-fill all your information from the last year and it's connected to practically every govt agency and even pre-fills my income and income tax, so the only thing I have to enter is my interest from my shares (which I copy off the form the company sends me), make up a couple of deductions and done!
After we have this kid in August it might be little more complicated because we get family tax deductions of some sort, so I might get my husband's accountant to do all our taxes, but even then it's worth it because you can claim the accountant's fee as a tax deduction!
I do mine by hand-both canadian and america taxes for myself and mr. floridagal.
I do mine by hand-both canadian and america taxes for myself and mr. floridagal.
Doing your taxes online via TurboTax or whatever was once described to me as: “a video game where I know all the answers and the prize is money!”
Yeah, I refuse to try and remember last year’s return. (Also, I am all kinds of pissed off that they want me to save receipts for the last seven years because FUCK YOU NO. Either we have privacy from the government, which is kind of a ship that has sailed, or the government can keep track of my goddamn finances for me.*)
But ESmartTax will remember that sort of thing for me, which is great. Because I Do Not Math, and also…post office? It’s all the way over there. And then I have to remember to go. And ennnngh.
*Also, fuck you sites that don’t remember my credit card info. Like I want to dig out my wallet, which is OVEER THEEERE, and type the whole number in again? Pfeh. Can we just hook my retinal scan up to my bank account already?
and the code generator thingie doesn't always work. i do married filing jointly, so I need TWO codes, and of course it usually works for me and almost never works for my husband and who has any idea why. ugh.
that said i do just use our AGI from last year instead of the code and that works fine.
how did you find your CPA? word of mouth, or is there some kind of listing/review system one can use?
(many thanks in advance if you reply – this is giving me all sorts of difficulty!)
Mallory’s comment about doing taxes “to the best of her ability and knowledge” made me wince because of course the IRS does not care about that at all (having been a frequent auditee ever since the very first return I ever filed while a sophomore in college – I think I may gotten myself red-flagged then).
But at least I can offer the fruits of my school-of-hard-knocks experience to all of you, which is: when the IRS audits you, go ahead and contest, unless they are actually making your refund bigger or it is something very straightforward. Because very often they can and do back down — they are not at all infallible and they know it — so contest away! I am successful a good 85 % of the time in at least getting the charge reduced, and not infrequently in getting it wiped away completely.
Also the people at the IRS who work the phones are actually very nice and helpful once you wait long enough to reach them, UNLIKE the phone respondents at HR Block, who do not know a fraction of what the IRS clerks do and want to charge you for it anyway. Hurrah for public (government) services!
Edit: I do have sort of complicated taxes, though, having freelanced and done other funny things. If you just have W-2s this might be less applicable/relevant.
Mallory's comment about doing taxes "to the best of her ability and knowledge" made me wince because of course the IRS does not care about that at all (having been a frequent auditee ever since the very first return I ever filed while a sophomore in college – I think I may gotten myself red-flagged then).
But at least I can offer the fruits of my school-of-hard-knocks experience to all of you, which is: when the IRS audits you, go ahead and contest, unless they are actually making your refund bigger or it is something very straightforward. Because very often they can and do back down — they are not at all infallible and they know it — so contest away! I am successful a good 85 % of the time in at least getting the charge reduced, and not infrequently in getting it wiped away completely.
Also the people at the IRS who work the phones are actually very nice and helpful once you wait long enough to reach them, UNLIKE the phone respondents at HR Block, who do not know a fraction of what the IRS clerks do and want to charge you for it anyway. Hurrah for public (government) services!
Edit: I do have sort of complicated taxes, though, having freelanced and done other funny things. If you just have W-2s this might be less applicable/relevant.
Like, a thousand Australian Toast lurkers are just weeping silent tears of gratitude after reading this thread.
Seriously, guys, how do you do this.