Date: March 28th, 2010
As part of the continuing series: "things I should've learned by now", I finally did my taxes. And by did my taxes I don't mean 'dropped off all my tax paperwork at my parent's house and said: thanks mom, when's dinner?'. I mean I actually sat down with forms in hand and filled everything out. Every minute, painful little detail.
Ok, to be fair, most of it wasn't that bad. For the most part I just plugged in the numbers on how much money I made last year (go go student employment) and figured out which of this or that I qualified for. Honestly, thanks to Turbo Tax I'd put it around the same difficulty level as changing my wiper fluid.
That is... until I got to the home heating credit. They asked me to put in my income, then multiply it by something, subtract something else, multiply that number by a number and take the total. Then they asked me if that total was above or below a certain amount and then asked me to multiply it again, divide it, take the square-freakin-root, stand on my head and walk backwards on even ground, do the hokey-pokey and then fall down.
So maybe it wasn't that bad, but it was so unnecessarily complex that I eventually got laughing about it. It was definitely different to see how the tax code applies to an individual's accounts than it was to study it in class. Though, to be fair, it did seem unnecessarily complex and annoying in class too -- despite having one of the better professors at the school for it. And that's why we have pass/fail, kiddies.
It did feel pretty darn good to be able to understand all the things I needed to do and fill out. I, quite frankly, don't see anything wrong with handing one's mom a stack of papers and asking for help at eighteen. But now we're hitting mid-20's. Its time to know how to do this stuff on my own and without assistance. Well, except for Turbo Tax. Heaven help me if we didn't have Turbo Tax.
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