GRRRRRRR, stupid taxes.

Short version: Oh. My. God. Do I ever hate doing taxes!

Long version: Okay, so for the past few years, we just take all our forms into the tax office on base and sit there for 20 minutes while they do it all for us. For free. And I don’t worry about it, because (1) it’s free and (2) we never get back that much to worry about it (i.e. paying someone $100 to get us back $300).

When I told my friend/coworker this, she thought I was nuts. She says every year, she does her taxes on TurboTax and Taxcut online to see which gives her more, than does it herself online. She said she gets back quite a bit more because she can take her time to go through EVERY little thing. She told me I could probably write off some of my business expenses, which I never do because I don’t really make any money and I don’t really have that many expenses (i.e. I use cable internet, but we’d have it and pay for it even if I didn’t use it for the business—and I buy toners, but I’d buy those anyway, even if I do use more for the business, and besides, it just scares me to deduct for business things because I do not want an audit).

So anway, I thought fine, this year, I will follow her lead and do them online to see where I end up. Which I attempted to do this morning. And 4+ hours later I now have the biggest headache imaginable.

I did TurboTax first (the $80 premier business version, figuring if I was going to do the business deductions, I should at least do that one) and that was quite involved, but I felt good about it because it asked a me a lot of stuff about the business and square footage of my office space and my utilities and it took the percentages and whatnot and figured my deductions. In the end, after an hour of messing with it, I had a measly return of $435—in other words, not too much more than we’d normally get just doing the regular tax return (compared to previous years)…so I wasn’t sure if it would be worth it (I estimated some of the figures, because I wasn’t about to go digging through my checkbook for the past year’s utility payments, etc.).

So then I went over to Taxcut, but only selected the regular (non-business specific) version, and ended up with a refund of $337—only $100 difference for a shitload less work. When I quickly added some business info (granted, not using the business version of the software), they told me that I was not able to take any home office deductions with the info I input!

So then I went back to TurboTax and created a new account just using the basic version (which would cost $30). After another hour, it came in with a return of $345 (vs. the business-edition refund of $435). So, I would save $50 by using a lesser software edition, but would lose $90 in refund (net gain $40). Big whoop. And it seems stupid to go with the Home & Business TurboTax because while it would get me $100 more, I would have to pay $80 to use it. (I didn’t even save my TaxCut info because I just wasn’t thrilled with the site.)

I guess worst case scenario I take my basic forms (i.e. no business stuff) into the base tax office and see what they say my return is. If it is a significant difference from either of the two I did online (say, if I owe money!), I will have to either (1) go more in-depth with the base office and dig out all my business stuff or (2) just push the button on one of the TurboTax versions and deal with it.

This all just seems like a lot of work for very little return (no pun intended). And while I would like to take some home office deductions, I really don’t want to “poke the bear” and take the chance of an audit because really, you’re only supposed to use your home office as your office (100%) and that’s certainly not the case here.

I just don’t understand why this has to be so difficult… But in this case, I think I blame my coworker, LOL (you hear that, Jennie? :>>)—if she hadn’t tried to convince me this was for the best, I would have just taken everything to the tax office like the past five years and been done with it, not knowing anything different.

So, I can’t wait to see what happens…stay tuned.