Thursday, February 03, 2005

Speaking of Taxes

Dale and I filed our taxes the other evening. We have a great CPA whose business plan is to legitimately get his clients every penny they are entitled to. Since we are obligated by Constitutional amendment to pay taxes, I want to pay whatever we are legally responsible for paying and not one damn dime (sound familiar?) more.

John is always amazed at how organized I am. I handed him a three ring binder, divided into various sections, W-2's, medical, mortgage, charitable giving, and so on. I had an itemized list of all our prescriptions (and receipts for each), and the mileage to and from the doctor's offices and the pharmacies we use. Since Florida now allows a sales tax deduction, I had gone back through all our receipts and itemized the sales tax. Turns out that was a waste of time. There's a formula that's used to figure the sales tax allowance and it was something like four times what I had listed. You betcha we used that figure and not mine! And I won't bother keeping track of sales tax next year. It was mostly for my own interest to see how much we paid in sales tax anyway.

We spent about forty minutes driving to his home, spent maybe 30 minutes talking to him, and our taxes were electronically filed. Before we left, Kansas City had confirmed receipt of our tax return. We should get our return direct deposited to our bank account by the end of next week.

Ain't technology grand?

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