Money Matters
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Tax Return: Have you filed yet?
We just filed our return this morning and I was pleasantly surprised we will be getting a refund. Our goal is typically to get close to zero and avoid having to pay (I just hate the idea of cutting a check). We had a 25% increase in income this past year, but between grad school tuition, mortgage interest, student loan interest, charitable donations and other deductions, we managed to swing a $2,700 refund. We plan to put the refund in our savings account and putting part toward paying off our car loan.
Have others filed yet? What do you plan to do with your refund?
Re: Tax Return: Have you filed yet?
and we use a CPA so things are slow. I do not expect a large refund but if we do get one we'd probably save it or use it for dental work H needs.
I filed federal this weekend and we will be getting a good amount back! We've always owed for federal so I think we are back to normal this year. in 2014 I had a second job which I think made us owe $ for tax time, then 2015 we had our condo sale/house purchase which we owed again, so it's good to be back to normal. Once we get the federal back we will put into savings towards H's new car we need to buy, then we will file the state one.
And actually my dad showed me how to use the H&R Block program this time so I should be able to do it myself in the future in case he's not around..
Us too. The tax code really needs fixed.
We're going to put it toward the baby fund.
I entered in the basic stuff in to TurboTax though and it appears that we'll get around $600 for a federal refund and around $1200 for a state refund. I guess one of us should consider doing M+1 on our state tax form to see if we can get that down a little. This is the third year we've received a $1,000+ state refund.
We put $3500 toward my student and kept the rest in savings.
I always used a CPA when I was a 1099 because a) he was good at tweaking things and helping me come up with more write-offs... like the year I made $108,000 and didn't pay any quarterlies (terrible idea by the way), I only owed about $14,000 with him. And, b) I liked the idea of having some support in case I were to get audited for some reason. I felt like the $300 I paid him was basically an insurance policy for the latter.
Now we use one because H likes to. It's a friend of his and he does a good job. And, like labro mentioned, I feel like he is able to help us tweak things to minimize the damage, we owed last year and might again this year. If I was just single though, I'd probably just use TurboTax or the like as I would probably just have simple stuff and get a refund every year.
There's a worksheet on the back of the W4 form that you can fill out that will tell you how many exemptions you should be claiming. This (https://apps.irs.gov/app/withholdingcalculator/) will do the same thing, but it's online.
Whatever we're left with after we pay will be put into savings to replace our furnace this spring or summer (providing it doesn't crap out sooner).
Yeah. I'm just looking at how much would I have to save to make it worth it versus my current process of doing it myself.