I Surrender!

 I finally broke down and made an appointment to get my taxes done by a pro. In this case, it's a company which works out of the local Walmart with an introductory customer fee of $49. My goal is for them to show me exactly how to interpret governmental gobbledygook so I can (hopefully) do it again next year. I want a hard copy of everything to bring home, not least of which for signing before mailing. I can buy some large envelopes while I'm there.

I expect most of you have somebody else do your taxes, or have very simple basic returns, once  basic income and deductions are entered, zip - zip and it's done, either in the mail or sent online.

Those who know me well enough should be shocked that I have resorted to this. After all, I did my own self employment (aka independent contractor or IC) taxes for almost 30 years. It involved the usual forms plus schedules C, SE, and B, plus keeping all receipts for each year, and I do mean all. Each year's expanding file folder was about 4" thick. I claimed mileage deductions, and easily averaged 80 thousand in any given year. I put over 2 million miles, all told, on a succession of cars before I retired. Some of that was personal miles, so those had to be sorted out. Then there was gas, uniforms, car repairs and maintenance, and even the fast food bills proving I actually was in such-and such a town at time x and way the hell over elsewhere gassing up again. (I couldn't deduct the actual food.) I kept all that in case of an audit. Let them have the headache if they wanted to quibble. (They never did.) I learned very early to just go by mileage deductions, which eventually wound up at $.51 per work mile. But I did it all every year because I knew what I was doing due to company training on IC taxes, and the only change each year was how much per mile times number of business miles for that part of it. It was just a matter of having the paperwork, a log for each day, and sitting down for a couple of hours. 

It was predictable. The instructions made sense.

One might think with retirement that all would be much easier. I have to fill out forms that don't apply to my life these days, I have to read instructions that don't make sense, like if number X is larger than Y, subtract X from Y.  OK, that gives me a negative number, which now I'm now supposed to do several other things with just to find out how much of our Social Security is taxable. Math gets a bit weird when working with negative numbers. And why not subtract the smaller number from the larger instead of the reverse? Did somebody hit their head on the corner of the table when they tried to stand on it upside down when writing the instructions? 

Note that even last year I did our taxes with X dollars of our SS not taxable. It was a finite cutoff for how much was tax-free, suitable for everybody, and any other income and deductions were calculated in later. It even included a report on capitol gains which I'd never done nor needed to, but the instructions made sense and one wound up with a set amount which you either made more or less than, period, and that determined how much tax needed to be paid.

Then there will be state taxes as well as my part time job with some withholding, and interest payments. Somewhere in there one also has to deal with property tax paid out of one's rent. That's new to me since one has to pay it over a full year and this is our first full year in paying rent. In our case the lot our home sits on is rented and we get a form mailed to us about how much of our rent is taxes. A tax preparer will be figuring that part out this year for us. And they damn well better be explaining all this new crap to me so I can take notes and do our own taxes again next year!

Steve and I have both gotten fed up with my fighting with the forms this year. They can't just  say $XXX is tax free, but all the rest of your income is taxable. Most years they've done that and only the numbers change. Now it's like the circus performer spinning a dozen plates on top of sticks and keeping them all in the air at the same time, except somebody threw in bowls instead of plates here and there.

Frankly, I'm convinced they (DOGE???) have deliberately made it as complicated as possible just so they can force us all to hire a tax preparer. If it's this bad next year, I'm going to hunt out one of those people who helps out Seniors for free. You just have to find out who and where and get in line early. 

For now, there's a book that's calling me. I'm ready for a distraction.