Taxes Suck

We all know that paying taxes sucks. Preparing to pay them, or even getting a refund sucks more because it’s more work. The brilliance of the payroll deduction system is that we never actually see that money, so we don’t really miss it. It’s subtle. Preparing all the paperwork is a royal pain.

I’m working on my 2012 taxes tonight. We moved last year, sold a house, bought a car, had medical expenses, and who knows what else. We are going to have lots of deductions. That’s good, but gathering all that information is real work.

We do have an excellent document scanner in the house, so everything is scanned into electronic form and thrown into huge folders on our home server. That helps, but man oh man are there a lot of documents to get organized and into spreadsheets so that our anticipated 2-hour appointment with the tax folks at H&R Block doesn’t take forever.

It’s amazing how simplifying life tends to complicate taxes. There’s definitely no 1040-EZ for us this year.