... and taxes
Today I entered round 4 of trying to complete my income taxes. Well, maybe it was yesterday. I was working to get the California income taxes finished and by my calculations was going to owe nearly \$1000 to California alone. On top of that, California has this ridiculous rule that if you owe more than \$200, you have to be penalized for not paying enough money. So adding the federal & state taxes together, I was going to owe over \$1500. It was bleak & depressing, but I didn't see how there was any choice. Today, I was in the process of copying over the federal 1040, and noticed that I might have made a mistake calculating the capital gains/losses on the Schedule D. But i wasn't sure, because its all confusing, and I couldn't find any useful guidance on what logical results should look like. Denise & I kicked around the idea of just going to H&R Block, but I figured I'd give TurboTax a try. Three hours later I had a completed state & federal return which looked reasonably accurate, although I'm still not sure what accurate is at this stage. So I'm going to go with what Turbotax claims I owe, a combined total of about \$1000. Worst case is that its wrong, and I get billed for more. I'm not trying to defraud any government, but I don't agree with having to pay someone to do my taxes just because the instructions are written so poorly that only an accountant can figure them out.
This morning I went to get new tires for the car. The front had virtually no tread left, and the rear were getting close to that state too. I got four Dunlops for a grand total of \$462. They have a 65k mile warranty, so hopefully I won't need to get new tires again for this car.