Taxes Suck!

I dreaded how complicated it was going to be to figure out how to file my taxes this year. As a newly married person who worked in NY but lived in NJ & NY and whose spouse worked in PA and NJ but lived in PA, NY, and NJ (agh! that's a mouthful!), I was not sure where or how to start. This is what I looked like just thinking about it:

So I took my parents advice and decided to use Turbo Tax. Supposedly, the program would guide me through the entire painful process with as little pain as possible.

It was still very painful.

Even after gathering all the tax documents I needed (which is not as easy as it sounds when your husband can't find a copy of his W2 and has to talk to HR to get a copy), I had to do tons of calculations to determine allocations of incomes to each state, etc.

I began to look more like this:

I was pleasantly surprised when I saw my Federal tax refund. I patted myself on the back for planning ahead of time and having extra money taken out of my paycheck once I got married.

Then I got to the NY Tax Return. I was absolutely sure there was something wrong with the Turbo Tax program when it counted nearly all of my husband's & my income as the "NY Taxable Income". I re-entered numbers, asked my husband if it seemed right, and read about other's frustrations with this same problem.

As it turns out, living in NY for part of the year is basically equivalent to living in NY for the entire year, at least tax-wise. So what if NJ gives me a credit on their state taxes for some (and I mean only some) of the tax you pay to NY state. It's just not fair.

I dealt with the unfairness and moved on. After many many more hours, everything was done. I looked something like this after all of the work:

My plan for next year:

Hire an accountant!!!!!