Taxes

Just writing that one-word title made my body shiver "Ugh!" Can't imagine how it was for you reading it. Anyway, today's the day all that stuff is due. And, thankfully, Paul wrapped ours up and e-filed them a few days ago. (Thank you, Paul!)

After going through the process of preparing our tax return for the first time as fulltimers, I thought I'd share some of our learnings about doing taxes on the road.

E-File

This isn't the first year we've filed our return electronically, but it was definitely the most convenient year to do so. We didn't have to print off the return, find a post office, etc. When we were done, we just clicked "submit". (Although, I must confess we kind of miss the ritual of standing in the last minute line at the Post Office. OK. Not really!) And, of course, we did all that on our private wifi network. You don't want to risk sharing that information with some geek hacking your park wifi!

It's Deductible

As our faithful readers know, we gave lots of stuff to charities last year. (Lots!) While it seemed like a PIA at the time, we made detailed lists of everything we gave away. We logged on to an Intuit web site called "It's Deductible" and it helped us place a value on our giveaways and loaded it right into TurboTax and our return. It took some time, but it was definitely worth it.

TurboTax

We've used this tax preparation software for years. As fulltimers, it's all about the convenience factor. This nifty program makes it easy to do it yourself wherever you are, whenever you want. We didn't have to go searching for a tax preparer or shuffle documents back and forth to our CPA.

Backup Plans

One of the last things I did before we gave away our desktop computer was save our returns for the last several years on a CD. We safely stored the CD in the moose. The first time we needed to access last year's return, we pulled out the disc and made a horrible discovery: the disc was corrupted. Lesson learned: Always test the documents you burn to a CD before you nuke your PC. (Hey, I was in a hurry!) New discovery: The IRS will happily mail you a transcript of past year's returns. (All it takes is the patience of Job to navigate the agency's audio response unit and wait to talk with a human being.)

Watch the Calendar

Now that we've been fulltiming for awhile, dates don't really matter. Since we've been in perpetual pursuit of Spring, we've lost our sense of the calendar anyway. And, we tossed our "to-do" lists a long time ago. Despite that, we manage to fill our days quite nicely. Between going places and seeing things, we've been pretty busy. So, a big project with a deadline is an alien concept to us these days. Paul was diligent about staying on top of collecting all of the info we needed to complete our return and then making time to do the deed and file the thing well in advance of April 15th. If it had been up to me, I would've spaced it.

Hope that helps. Now, if you were looking for some ways to reduce your taxes here, we can't help you there. Sorry, but good luck with that.

Happy Tax Day!