Whew Just Finished my Taxes for 2005

[Jadow]

I just finished my taxes for 2005. Taxcut helped a lot, first time I used it over Turbotax and I have no complaints.

Anyways, I learned a big lesson to remember. Don't mess around with rinky dink investments. It's not worth headache for a lot of small 50, 100, 200 dollar buy and sell investments. You get stupid little 1099 DIV's for like .47 cents, and stupid short term capital gains and losses of 5 dollars, 12 dollars etc... I ended up like tripling the time it took do do my taxes for a net short term gain of like 20 bucks. Not worth it.

Next time I decide to invest outside of my retirement account, I'll invest minimum $2000 and NOT SELL IT!

Ended up taking about 75 minutes to fill out and double check with TaxCut, got a $1800 federal refund, and 600 state. I've already lowered my withholding so that my refunds are smaller for 2006. I'd like to end up with a net of about $500 - $1000 in refunds. I know it's best to be at $0, but I don't mind getting a refund.

 

[Night201]

Same here with the stocks. I'm now trying to figure out all this Employee Purchase Stock crap.

 

[Schfifty Five]

let the good times roll...

 

[bondboy]

so what are you going to do with that refund? 😉

 

[edro]

You can just not claim it...

 

[Jadow]

use it to pay off my Discover Card 0% balance transfer which convienently expires this month!

 

[JulesMaximus]

I wish my taxes were half as easy as yours...:roll:

Ugh, I loathe tax time. Break out the checkbook and pay the man!!!

 

[tfinch2]

What I learned: Wait until late February to make sure you get all of your W2 before you do your returns. Some employers start calculating taxes for 2005 in December of 04. I completely forgot I worked for a place during Christmas break of 04, and they sent me a W2 for 05.

 

[Jadow]

that's good advice, I knew all the forms I was waiting on and the last ones came yesterday.

 

[cubby1223]

Last year it took me about 3 hours to figure out that darn 1099 DIV stuff to find out in the end that $1.36 in qualified dividends in fact does not change the amount of taxes I owed. I tried to do them the morning of April 15th, and none of the tax forms make any sense to me because all the instructions are "if line 12 is greater than line 6, subtract line 14 from line 15 and put that value in line 17 and then proceed to line 20."

All they had to say was "we are finding out if it is cheaper to tax the qualified dividends separately at a lower rate." This I understand and could do in 10 seconds.