Tuesday, February 3, 2009
The taxes I submitted were accepted by the IRS and state. The only return I was not able to e-file was the business IL-1120-ST state return. I don’t expect any issues with that (assuming TurboTax calculated the replacement tax charge properly.). The reason I say initial success is because I assume audits come after-the-fact, so assuming they don’t do that to me, I should be done with taxes for 2008! Seeing as I tried to factor in every little thing, I should not have issues even if they try to audit me (although it will waste my time, and time is money…).
I should be getting back almost one invoice (after estimated taxes) worth of refund money.
Downsides:
- TaxCut (personal) and TurboTax (Business) ended up costing me around $270.
- Illinois business replacement tax exists.
- Wasted money using filetaxes.com for my w-2 when I probably could have used TurboTax business (which I didn’t have at the time). Although, filetaxes.com supports w-2c forms, and TurboTax does not.
- TaxCut advertised that their program would file pass-through business returns, but it does not.
Plus-sides:
- The programs made filing safer and less time consuming (although they still require a lot of background knowledge to use when doing business related taxation).
- I now know how to properly fill out a w-2 form (ha ha ha…).
- I paid a lot less in Illinois replacement tax than I thought I would. The reason being is that wages to myself don’t count toward the total and I had a few start-up expenses that I was able to write-off (anything under $5000 can be completely written off the first year).
- Overall I should come out in positive money.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
My next message to the new administration through their website:
Don’t you think it’s odd that two people the President chose have had recent tax problems? Maybe taxation in the United States is too complex, and should be simplified. More specifically, small business taxation seems overly complex, and our new Health and Human Services Department manager, Daschle, can’t even figure it out. Or maybe he didn’t want or care to figure it out to save money…
Hopefully they will take the hint and think about it. Double standards and unnecessary complexity. Integrity doesn’t seem to be in a politician’s dictionary.
I did my W-2 to myself wrong. More specifically, I was putting values into social security at my actual rate instead of 1/2 which is the rate that people pay (the employer plays the other half). Same goes for medicare taxes. I also screwed up with the wages field because I did not deduct the money I paid to my retirement plan. (box 1) should be less than (box 3) and (box 5), if you have money going into a 401k plan. I submitted a w-2c through filetaxes.com….
Edit: Double ugh… I didn’t change the rate of state taxes. I should have made it the lower rate from (box 1) too. Oh well….
Double Edit: I submitted yet another W-2C with the state correction.
I’ve been going through TaxCut (the first program I bought, the one I will use for only personal taxes). It hasn’t been to bad so far. It found those issues in my W-2. So far I’ve got a refund going. Enough to pay for these two programs and then a bit extra. (assuming the IRS doesn’t go after me for whatever reason).
Once I’m all done with everything. I need to get re-organized. Move everything 2008 to an archive and move on to 2009.
Another irritating thing is I can’t login into that HSA account. Tried emailing them in early January, no response. Maybe I should look for a local replacement (just thinking here). Always, always something to waste time. It is a good learning experience though.