Throwing money at the problem!

This year some sort of insanity gripped me and I decided to do my own taxes.

To be honest, I have always done my own taxes, up until Beanie was born. After she was born I did not have the energy with a newborn baby to figure out child credits and stuff, so I ended up using an accountant, and have used him the past two years.

This year, as I mentioned in my earlier post, he sold his business and does not have very complimentary things to say about the new owners so I said - heck I will do it myself using last year's return as a template. Of course this year I had some new things, but with some research and  phone call to IRS I figured it out.

I spend many hours doing a  rough draft, reading though pages of instructions, doing all the Schedules/worksheets/forms (by hand!), checking them, etc, Then my Dad checked them and very kindly keyed the numbers into the online PDFs to save me some time. I rechecked the final copies, made duplicates, put them in envelopes and was ready to mail them this week.

The one thing I could not recall was what Federal forms need to be attached to the State taxes, so I decided to go back and look at what I submitted previously. And that is when it all fell apart.

I saw that two years ago I had submitted a Schedule D.

Um...what? I did not last year.

I reviewed my last couple of returns comparing numbers and turns out this year I needed a Schedule D :-(

Then as I started really reading through the paperwork from my brokerage account it turns out there was stuff in there not reported to the IRS for which it clearly said I needed another freaking form in addition to the Sch D.

ARGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHH!!

I spent about 2 hours yesterday trying to unravel all this and realized that even if I figure out the numbers and did the new form and Schedule D, I would need to REDO my entire return, since it would change income slightly and hence every darn form would need to be redone.

That is when I lost it.

I called the accountant office and have an appointment for Monday AM to get it done. Yes, its throwing money at it the problem, but sometimes that is what it takes!!

Next year I will buy a tax software!