Taxed About Taxes

An article by Don Quixote    No Comments

First off, excuse the mess. The basic shape of the blog is up, but I’m still playing with internal layout and other fine tuning (one of those is the RSS feed). But I will be in DC this weekend with nothing to do so I’ll be hitting it hard then.

So taxes.

One of those two certainties in life; every year without fail comes around to be dealt with.

I’m an early tax filer. My thinking is the quicker I can get it done, the quicker I can get my money back. There are a lot of things I’m pretty good at, but taxes isn’t really one of them. I’m a classic over-payer, I take 0 deductions from my paycheck from all my jobs in hopes that by over paying I’ll get a nice beefy refund. Now there are many who would argue that I’m really wasting my money because I’m not gaining any interest or putting that extra dough to work into a money market fund or something complicated sounding like that.

These people are dead on right. But what is a simple guy like me to do? If I had time or knew the right guy to go to, I’d have a little less withheld and send it into the money making machine. Right now unless some jumps up and says, “Bob, Bob, pick me, pick me! I have just the guy (or gal) you’re looking for,” I’m going to stick with status quo.

Aside from being an early filer, I’m also an online e-filer as well. I’ve been a www.turbotax.com guy ever since I started doing my own taxes. One of the cool features is that they tell you if your taxes have been accepted or not. This is where my perplexing comes from. So I filed on the 3rd, within 3 hours my federal taxes were accepted. It took the state of Indiana until the 9th to finally accept their portion (talk about stressing out), but sure enough two days later I had my state refund.

So you’re probably thinking what I’m thinking, “Umm, where’s your federal?” Yeah, I was thinking that too. According to www.irs.gov my refund is expected no later than Feb. 23, but man, what in the world? Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me any way you slice it.