Taxes and turbotax

Got the taxes done a little after midnight last night, in a mostly painless process. I didn't even start until after dinner, and I was just going to get the paperwork all in order, and do them today. I normally do our taxes in early February, but a certain employer who shall remain unnamed was being a total pain in the ass about sending me my W-2, to the point where, after two letters and a phone call, I finally had to involve the IRS. Go figure: it showed up a week later. (They had sent it to my prior address in Anchorage, despite my having sent a letter last October updating my address, and then claimed to already have re-sent it to my Atlanta address, which was pretty much a lie.)

The main time-consuming thing I needed to do was assign values to the many, many piles and bike loads and car loads of stuff we donated to the Starvation Army, Goodwill, Habitat for Humanity, and Big Brothers/Big Sisters when we were moving from Alaska.

Moving is good like that: sorta forces you to go through your stuff, identify what is crap and needs to be tossed, what can be freecycled, sold, ebayed, and what someone at a thrift store will pounce on, even when you haven't used it in months or years. We literally had about ten major dropoffs where it was worth it to itemize and get a receipt from the thrift store, and probably another couple dozen which were a few items at a time, and I would just drop them off on my ride to work and not bother with receipts (or deducting them later. Note to self in the future: bother with the receipts.)

So anyway, Turbotax has a built-in donation value tool called Itsdeductible, which can make the whole process much easier than guessing, or trying to use the limited guides various Goodwills and Salvation Army stores make available on the internetz. Problem is, you can't use it until you've proceeded to that point in your taxes, so I actually had to start our return, and get through the income, to the deductions part. And by the time I'd spent literally about 2.5 hours inputting all of the donations, item by item, and valuing them, there wasn't much left to do on the taxes, so I figured I might as well finish them.

The other problem is that some of the values Itsdeductible gives are absurd: household items like bowls and cups and plates, which most thrift stores sell for $0.99 unless they are a matching set, valued at $6? Hell, no. Now, I'm fine with taking a reasonable deduction, but I couldn't in good faith submit a return taking $4 for a bowl that I myself paid $1.50 for at a thrift store. So I had to spend a lot of time manually entering things like individual cups for $0.25, and individual bowls for $0.50. And books! Nonsense! They value donated hardcovers at something like $4, and paperbacks at $3! Preposterous! (I valued them at $0.50 hardcover, and $0.25 paperback.)

Overall, I was once again perfectly happy with Turbotax, and got a pretty good price on it. Note: anyone who doesn't search the web for Turbotax discounts is a sucker! Anyone can get 35% off, making the Deluxe version $32 and change, through Bank of America, customer or not. Just search it. There will be a little thing in the top of each screen that says "Presented by [BofA logo]" but it's not intrusive, and I barely noticed it. It's also nice that you can get all the way through your taxes before paying for Turbotax, so if you start them and then realize you actually need a more robust version (e.g., you have a small business and really needed to use the Premier version) you can do that.

What I did HATE about Turbotax, and I really think it was worse this year, was the number of sillyass add-ons they try to sell in the end of the process. I mean, you just told me my "audit risk" was about as low as can be, and now you want me to buy audit insurance for $40? I can have the convenience of paying for Turbotax through my refund, rather than with a pesky credit card, for an added fee of $30? Are y'all out of your damn minds?

I definitely don't miss my pennywise/pound foolish days when I would sit down and do all of our taxes on paper, triple checking all of the calculations, doing endless unnecessary worksheets only to confirm we don't get a particular credit, and mail them in.

Now to go ride my bike! Woo!