Taxes Are DONE!

Ever since getting married a year and a half ago, doing taxes has always been my husband's job. It's funny since I pretty much handle everything else financially related, but I've pushed this task onto him. I'm not sure why he did them last year, but I conned him into doing them again this year. We used Turbo Tax to file and they let you compare information from previous years if you have the previous year's tax returns on the same computer. I used that excuse to tell my husband that was why he needed to do the taxes. Oh and I checked and it doesn't matter who the primary filer for our economic stimulus rebate is since the last 2 digits of our social security numbers are within 3 digits of each other. But I don't think we'll be getting our rebate on time anyway since we didn't end up filing until yesterday. We did e-file, but I don't think they can process our returns that quickly. Note the link above states that your returns need to be filed and processed by April 15. That's okay.

I think the reason my husband and I procrastinated so much on the taxes this year is because we knew we were going to owe money. Well at least I knew so I didn't push him to do them sooner. I wanted to change our withholdings midyear so we would get less of a tax rebate, but when I went to the IRS withholding calculator, I found out that we were going to owe taxes. Needless to say, I ended up changing the withholding on my paycheck the other way to get less money, but apparently it wasn't enough. The total additional amount we had to pay was about $4K federal and $2K state. I don't know the exact numbers since C did the taxes. I asked C if we had to pay a penalty since we owed so much in taxes, but he said he didn't see any fines on our return.

I surmised that our withholding issue is related to both our paychecks. Our AGI was significantly higher this year than last due to substantial pay increases and C working for the full year. When C first started his job, his withholding might have been off since he made so little in 2006. He only worked for 1/4 of the year and then I made him contribute almost all of his salary to his 403B. Getting married in 2006 ended up reducing my tax liability significantly.

Ok, that's almost it for my post on taxes. One last thing - if there is anyone out there who still needs to do their taxes, H&R Block is now allowing everyone to use Tax Cut Basic and E File for FREE (I don't think this includes state taxes, but let me know if I'm wrong). Since I used Turbo Tax to do my taxes, I don't know much about Tax Cut, but you can't beat the price.