So, I did my taxes last night. All told it took 4-5 hours, but it seems to be getting easier each time I do it. I actually had almost $500 in charitable contributions to deduct this year. Surprise! Unless your medical expenses are 75% of your gross pay and you’ve done a LOT of charity giving you can’t write it off anyway – because it won’t be more than your standard deduction. (charitable deductions, medical expenses, and a few other things are added up on schedule 1040A – itemized deductions, if that is less than your standard deduction then you’ll just use the standard, which for me was $5,450)
Luckily this year I was able to write off all those medical expenses from the 2008 cancer/thyroid scare (almost $4,000!) since my business showed a profit (albeit small). And how did I show a profit? I didn’t write off any of my entertainment expenses this year (after painstakingly organizing them). Nevermind the fact that the majority of those medical expenses were illegal charges from the care providors (surprise, a little known fact is that if a providor takes your insurance they aren’t allowed to bill you for what the insurance doesn’t cover!). I can’t fight it of course, as I paid the bills when they came in – long before I read the tiny legal article in an in-flight airline magazine coming back from San Antionio in September. Plus the illegal charges are from several different sources, Sol Weiss MD, Quest Diagnostics and about five different bills from the ER “associated care providors.”
Anyway, my point is that writing off your donations may not be as solid a piece of advice as I thought. I was telling Byron to donate a lot of his clothes before he moves and write it off on his taxes next year instead of just dumping them in the trash. He should still donate them – just because that is the nice thing to do – but writing off that donation isn’t as simple as I thought.
Also – did anyone else notice that the tax tables are… missing.. from the California 540 instructions? They have a list of sales tax by county – but nothing to tell you what your income tax should be. For that you have to go to the website – where they have a calculator. I assumed (in error) it was the tax on the last page (which I’m now assuming is sales tax instead) and owed the state of California something like $700. After discovering the calculator it turns out the state owes me money. I wonder how many people they are counting on making that mistake… since, y’know, we’re bankrupt.
Same here. I gathered up 23 different sources of income and filled out the schedules and forms (federal) and was happly suprised that the various old geezer breaks I get this year made us elligable to get some of your mother’s money back from the black hole (pun intended) in D.C..– 1040 signed and almost sealed I decided to do the Ohio state taxes before sending off the 1040. The state forms do the calcs for you–IRS will probably have that function in a couple of years(sound of hell freezing over)–and Ohio was telling me that my numbers were not adding up. Went back to fed. and found out that in the ” if line 23 is greater than line 47a sub zn then take 1/2 of your father’s age and put on line 3 (but not if its past noon in Altoona!).” portion of one of the forms I mistakenly transfered “the lesser of the two numbers” to the wrong line on the 1040. $1200 mistake–and I went over the 1040 twice before that. Wow-now I am so happy we are getting some “change” back. I really like the pink “no money enclosed” label you have to put on the envelope–kind of like “no purchase required” on a sweepstakes.
If they made it easy we’d realize we don’t have to do it. Keep it hard and we’re too busy figuring it out and worrying we did it wrong.
And the Marching Morons are still heard saying “Oh boy–the Government is giving me stuff!!!”.
What program do you sue to do your taxes? Turbo Tax has a convenient program called “It’s Deductible”. It determines the value of your clothes for you. I love it. You just have to tell the type of clothing and it assigns it a value.
Don’t you have the mortgage interest from your condo to deduct too?
What program? My brain…
Yes, I do deduct the mortgage interest, of course. That doesn’t go on the itemized deductions though. Since I’m renting it out, there is a separate form (starts with an 8 if I recall correctly) for that.