I just finished our federal taxes. They were nuts this year (twenty pages!). That was without itemizing deductions on Schedule A and only a two pages of Schedule D. I had many more pages Schedule D pages when I was dabbling in stock trading in years past, but they were long lists of small gains and losses. Last year, I only had a few, but they were whoppers.
So, we owe the government a lot of money. Scratch that… we owe the government a metric fuckload of money (ah, I forget where I heard that term before). Fortunately, after leaving my previous employer early last year, I knew we were going to get hammered no matter what, so we were prepared. And actually we owe less than I thought. Have to look on the bright side of things.
Amanda had thought last week that we could have done things differently last year to ease the tax burden, and in retrospect that may be true, but only if we could have seen the future, so I personally do not regret financial decisions made last year.
In spite of the large check I will write out shortly, we don’t owe any penalties, because we escape with the “we prepaid more taxes than we owed last year” exception, which I did expect because I have done that many times in years past. Why let the government use your money interest free after all. Alas, we will have to be careful this year because there is no way we will wiggle out with that exception on next years taxes.
I did learn a lot on what I really could write off with my home business. I did not keep good enough records last year (mainly because I thought I would start using Quicken again, but I never got around to it), to wring every bit of “profit” out, but I kept track of the big things. I did manage to make 50% of my income vanish as expenses and whatnot anyway. I will keep much better track of things this year.