Funk Babblings

I've always been a do-it-yourself kind of person. I figure, why pay somebody else to do something that I'm perfectly capable of doing myself? Part of it is that I like having control over what I'm doing, and being aware of the whole process. (I even make my own return-address labels, using my printer's own graphics language.) So I do my own taxes, rather than paying somebody to do it for me. Not only that, I don't even use tax software, partly for the same reasons I don't use an accountant, and partly because none of it runs on Linux.

I started my taxes a 8:30 last night. I took the results to the post office at 1am. Every year I realize sometime around the end of February that I (supposedly) have all the information I need to start on my taxes -- "maybe I could get it done early this year!" -- and every year I wait until almost the deadline to get it done. I've often been among those lining up at the post office in the last hours before midnight on April 15 (and one year I resorted to filing an extension), so this year I was actually early.

But getting to that point required descending through The Three Circles of Tax Hell.....

( Read more... )