Three days from now, millions of procrastinating Americans will be hustling to get their tax forms finished and in the mail before the annual deadline. I won't be among them. I finished my taxes and grudgingly wrote the check to the U.S. Treasury a few weeks ago.
Three years ago I succumbed to temptation and the desire to be up-to-date and bought tax software for doing my taxes. For about 30 years I had been doing taxes on the long form, 1040, by hand, filling in each little block with a sharpened No. 2 pencil.
The first time I filled out the long form, soon after I bought a house for the first time, I found it not nearly as intimidating and difficult (this from someone who despised math and never had taken a business course) as I had expected. I soon became accustomed to the drill: Collect all your mortgage, property tax, charitable giving and other records of deductible expenses, along with all salary, interest and other income, add up the income statements and deductions, transfer the totals onto the tax forms, compute the taxable income, refer to the tax tables in the back of the 1040 book, and, voila, there's the refund.
Sign and mail the forms and wait for the refund check to arrive. That day when the refund check arrived was always one of the happiest days of the year. Even if the refund was small, in the low three figures, it was a cause for celebration.
Many a year my wife and I planned our household maintenance around our tax refund. One year, we'd buy paint for the exterior of the house. Another year we'd buy a new mattress or a rug.
This year, there is no refund, but we're still debating how to spend our tax rebate.
Since converting my decades-old system for doing taxes with pencil and calculator to the new tax software system, I find the process imminently less satisfying. The tax software is, no doubt, simpler. It asks a series of questions: "Do you have a W-2 form?" "Did you pay mortgage interest in 2007?" "Did you have other sources of income in 2007?" And so on.
The software guides you through these questions and calculates your taxes owed as you go along. But it's not quite as satisfying as adding up all those charitable deductions and deducting the total from your taxable income. It's the difference between reading a good novel and seeing the less-satisfying film version -- so much is omitted!
Of course, the tax software creates a far neater copy of the tax forms than I ever made. I usually picked up an extra copy of the 1040, plus forms A and B, just in case I needed to start over from the beginning. My tax records from the past three years are far more legible than in previous years.
This year, I threatened to go back to pencil and paper, but I caved in the end.
Although my tax returns were never very complicated, I did use the long form and had deductions for dependents, property taxes, mortgage interest and charitable deductions each year. Why anyone with a similar lack of complexity would need to hire a tax preparer, I've never understood. But I do remember years ago helping a young reporter who'd never filed taxes to fill out her 1040 EZ; she was intimidated by the form. I wonder if she's switched to tax software, too.
tarleton@wilsontimes.com | 265-7812