Stone Soup by Jan Eliot for April 12, 2015

Does Val really need a calculator? I just plug stuff into a tax software. I admit my tax situation is simple. Val’s doesn’t seem complicated, though: a house, two kids and a traditional job that would give her a W-2. No rental properties, no small business. Maybe she has some investments, but they would mail her 1099s.Mostly it seems my tax filing is about gathering up all the forms.I don’t have kids or own a house. Is it that much more confusing?

I used to do my taxes. It wasn’t so bad. Not sure when it got to be too much. I think the AMT didn’t help.

They must get that from their father’s side of the family…the putative Mr. Stone.

Yeah, I filed a month ago using tax software. Yesterday I got an AMENDED 1099 in the mail from the ya-hoos at e-trade. For the little pittance “play” account I have there, it changed my tax situation by $40 so I had to fill out amended returns for Fed and State and throw them in the mail. I suppose now I’ll get flagged for an audit or something. Just goes to show what trying to “get ’er done” did for me. I swear, next year I’m waiting until the morning of the 15th….

We (the hubby) always file our taxes online, and usually have it done before mid-February.

My mother once called my BIL at 9PM on April 14 to ask him to come to her apartment and help her with her taxes. Her place resembled an episode from The Hoarders, and she had not pulled anything together. If he’d shot her on the spot, I think he could have gotten off with justifiable homicide.

There’s one thing that everyone in the USA agrees on. Our current tax code is unfair. But nobody agrees on what makes it unfair or how to fix it.

Yeah…what you said !

The big Corporations would love that. That puts the entire tax burden on the bottom 50%. A .1%er doesn’t even know the price of a gallon of milk, a minimum wage working mom knows that an added 8% to a gallon of milk hurts every time she goes to the store.

I don’t think so!

My brother-in-law does his own special tax software. He also include a business he took over from his parents and leasing to own commercial building. He is not an accountant.

There’ll be a calculator on your smart phone.

I don’t have a smartphone, but a cell phone that doesn’t take pictures or have a stopwatch in it. But it DOES have a calculator in it, which I use.

Wally! Save Val!