My previous epistle in these pages talked about how to account for your cash flow using a
program named Quicken, from the Intuit corporation. They also publish another program named
TurboTax. This can help you account for one of the major outgoes in your financial life, paying
your taxes. TurboTax (TT) usually runs about $35, but the gimmick is, you have to buy it again
and again year after year, because this year's TT will not work next year, because all the tables
have changed, and often the tax laws have changed too. What a deal. Of course, they give you a
couple of bucks off if you are upgrading, but it is insignificant.
Johnny Carson said that the ultimate short tax form would simply say:
Step 1: How much did you make?
Step 2: Send it in.
Paying taxes is never fun. When I first started my working life, which is to say, when I first
started generating a taxable income, I had my parent's accountant do my taxes. Now, I was a
person who had an advanced degree in science, three years of college level calculus, and at that
time, absolutely no deductions of any sort worth the time to write them down. But I was so
afeared of the tax process that I just didn't want to deal with it.
Since then I have quite changed my attitude. I actually think that tax law can be sort of fun. If I
had to do my life all over again, and if I could not be a science kinda guy, I think I would like to
come back as a CPA. I even have a green eyeshade around here somewhere, but quill pens are
getting hard to come by.
You have to start off by eliminating from your mind any notion that tax law is designed to be
fair. Tax law is designed to grab the most money from the people least politically able to gripe
about it. Once you understand those ground rules, it all makes a kind of a perverse sense. Rather
like Quantum Mechanics sort of, kind of makes sense, when viewed from the right point of view.
I eventually started doing my own taxes. Things got real fun when I bought my first house.
Eventually I became a slumlord, and now my taxes are absolutely hilarious.
My taxes used to take about three days to do. Now that I am married to a lady with her own (hair
salon) business, they take about a week. This is true even if I use TT, because the actual
calculation part is not the real hard part. I used to keep all my records in a shoebox (plus my
Little Black Book). Now it has grown to a computer paper box, although still 8 X 11, and not yet
11 X 14. So step one is to dump the box of records on the floor, and spend the next two days
sorting out the good stuff from the "I guess I will keep it, but I don't know why" from the trash
pile (most of it). I make all kinds of little piles of check stubs, Visa transactions, water bills (I
still have my water bills from 1975, just in case somebody finally may think they found some
mistake on one). Then I isolate all the tax relevant stuff, toss the rest of it back in the big box,
and start laying out on paper all the taxable income (half a sheet) and the tax deductions (usually
about two sheets). Now, finally, I am ready to meet TurboTax on its own turf.
TurboTax will do the simple taxes very easily, but thirty five bananas is a rather high price to pay
to do a short form 1040. It will do moderately complex taxes with a moderately complex amount
of effort. I spent close to a whole day a couple of years ago trying to force the silly thing to
calculate some depreciation expenses correctly, till I finally figured out it was doing it correctly
all along, and that my method (aka "the fair method") was wrong. When it gets to those once in a
lifetime sort of things, it sometimes falls flat. Last year I did a rather complicated sale of one
house and purchase of another using the not well known Section 1031 scam, and TT did not have
a clue. So that got me into the bizarre problem of handing in a computer generate tax return, with
several hand written pages tacked on to fix the problems that TT could not handle.
For somebody that has a house, maybe a small business on the side, a little stock, more than a
few bucks of interest, is maybe on the edge for filing long or short, something like this can make
life easy. You can try several strategies, see which one gives you the most benefit, and then
dream up some justification for legally choosing that particular set of choices. Once you get into
the long form, this thing can save you tons of scribbling, and when you are all done but later find
that One More Deduction you had forgotten, it is rather painless to just crank out a new set of
returns.
TT has an interview process that guides you along, and asks for the sort of information that it
thinks you ought to have. I uses a set of Worksheets for this. So, for instance, it asks you if you
have a W2 form (most people do), puts up an image of a W2 on the screen, and you just copy the
data from your W2 to their screen image. This ends up creating one of the Worksheets. Many
other sorts of information that it needs it also interacts with you in the form of Worksheets.
I rather like this concept. Basically, the Worksheets allow you to enter much more information
than the basic tax forms require, but which if you later do have to go back and wonder why you
did thus and so, the information you need is in the Worksheets. The bad news is, getting at the
Worksheets can sometimes be a real pain, because the program does not always put them where
you think they ought to be. I spent close to an hour trying to find a depreciation schedule that I
had created and later wanted to retrieve some information from.
Once all the basic data has been entered, it asks you questions that will cover most every sort of
occurrence that 95% of the taxpayers fall into. It asks you about interest and dividend income,
and generates a worksheet. It asks you if you have rental property, or small business income, and
again pops you into a worksheet for all that. Except for the Section 1031 problem I referred to
above, I have always found these interviews to be amazingly complete.
As you are doing this, it is filling in all the appropriate forms that will ultimately be printed. At
any time, you can see any of the forms. It also provides a running summary that you can look at
at any time, that tells you if you are getting a refund, or if you are in the hole, and by how much.
I personally am afraid to look at this thing till I am completely done, because it is so
discouraging.
As you scan the forms, if you see an item that you have questions on, a double click of that item
will bounce you into the Worksheet that generated that field. Most of the time.
When you are done, a function will scan the forms for inconsistencies and errors, and give you a
list of things you really ought to fix. The problem here, is that this list is quite cryptic, and often
of little help in finding the bloody Worksheet that you have to fiddle with to correct things. It can
be quite frustrating, and sometimes this part takes more time that the actual entering of all the
data. When you get past the error check, it gives you a list of red flag areas, areas which the
program thinks would cause the IRS to be somewhat more interested in your return than an
average return. Like, if you have $6000 income and donate $3000 to charity, this may be quite
legal, but you can expect a nastygram questioning it, and the program will warn you about it.
The last step is to print out the forms. I have laser printer, so the forms print out exactly like a
real form would look, except it is single sided, and black&white. You can optionally print out
the worksheets, which in my case generates close to 30 pages of total printout. Just about every
form that a personal tax return could conceivably need is in its database, so you don't have to
make that extra trip to the IRS offices for the obscure form you forgot to ask for. I am told that it
will print out just fine on a 24 pin dot matrix printer as well. The IRS now allows you to file a
PC version of the forms, that only contain the numbers, and not all the other boilerplate. I was
not able to do that last year because of my Section 1031 problem, but I look forward to using that
this year. The printout can get quite voluminous, even without the worksheets, because TT seems
to kick out some extra forms just in case, I guess.
This year, the program comes on an optional CD Rom, which contains a pile of tax guides and a
some video clips of some tax gurus. The interface is supposed to be about like last year's, which
is good, because in the five years I have been using this thing, the interface has changed
dramatically every year.
For those people who live in states with an income tax, like Idaho, for another few bucks you can
get a state tax add on, that will spit out your state tax forms using mostly the data you already
entered for the federal forms. That is one of the benefits, at present, of living in Washington,
which has no such slash and grab.
One other nice feature is that you can roll all your boilerplate information from one year to the
next. This can cut down the amount of data entry by quite a lot. Last year's user interface did
not do well in using this information, however.
There are several other such programs out there, but TT has got the lion's share of the market,
probably why Microsoft tried to buy the company this year. I had hoped to try the CA Tax
program, which you can get this year for $19, and I have ordered it, but issue deadlines prevent
me from giving it an adequate trial. Maybe that will be my topic for next March's issue.
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