Thursday, April 15, 2010

Sigh of Relief

I'm breathing a big sigh of relief this morning, as I (mostly) finished our taxes last night. For once, I'm not spending the last few hours of April 15th slaving over the numbers! This is something I've traditionally waited until the last minute to do, especially when I'm afraid we're going to owe money. As our reserves are dangerously low, I purposely put this task off until the last minute.

On Monday, finally ready to face our fate, I sat down and ran some reports in Quicken, and entered the main numbers to give me a ballpark idea of what the damage would be. I can't tell you how so very relieved I was to see that my nightmare of us owing thousands of dollars (which we frankly do not have!) did not come to fruition. Yay! I moved on to getting back as much of what we paid as possible. On Tuesday, I started working on the more detailed entries. This year I used TurboTax desktop software. Compared with the online version, which I've used for a few years, I was not happy with the lack of flexibility in getting to the different sections. I guess I'm not much for following the "straight line" in getting to the end!

I started to enter the receipts I had, happily making progress. My husband mentioned he had a few in a drawer in the garage. Ok, great, I thought! That should help! I was thinking I'd be finished sometime Tuesday. Then he walked in with a BOX FULL of receipts. My jaw dropped! I started looking through them, and realized this would be a major undertaking. I spent some time roughly organizing them, and started fresh yesterday morning.

Wednesday I hunkered down and decided the best way to organize this paper monster was to make an Excel spreadsheet. One by one, those receipts became tamed. By the late afternoon, I was victorious! Once again, I had that feeling -- I'm done, right? But there were a couple nagging questions....

We were missing receipts. I knew a couple items we should have receipts for, but they weren't in the pile. While looking for something else, hubby stumbled upon them.. along with a few other receipts! Together, we worked through them. This time, we're pretty confident. We've got it all! Victory!

Well, I'm not that confident -- I'm going to mail an extension this morning. I'll give it a couple weeks, then send the final forms. Here's to being able to breathe again!

Off to stop at Starbucks to get our free coffee this morning!

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