New Year, Taxes and more...

Alright, my first post for the new year... Can't believe the so-called new year is already 41 days old when I sit down to write this. We have a new president (non-white I may add), an economy that is in the pits, and a personal "net worth" situation that is plummeting by the day. To make matters worse, my dear Sacramento Kings are scratching the bottom of the league with no end in sight for their travails. Ronald Reagan once famously said "recession is when your your neighbor loses his job, depression is when your friend loses his job, oppression is when you lose your job, and recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his job." We can normalize that quote for current times and hopefully cheer up ourselves for a protracted recovery process now that Dubya is out of a job.

Since Feb is already here, I sat down to figure out my taxes hoping for a silver lining somewhere, even before Barack's federal stimulus trickles down to me and starts filling my coffers. Believe it or not, 2008 is the first tax-year EVER that I will be filing taxes electronically. I finally got over my hump and decided to join the bandwagon of those technology-spoilt e-filers who perhaps helplessly place more trust in software than human comprehension of the federal tax code. I sat down with the online version of TurboTax and the software seemed slick on the things it did accomplish. It asked all the right questions and made a serious first-time user like me feel at home. The fact that the thing never lets you print/view tax worksheets in a traditional federal form format (until you cough up the money of course) did frustrate me several times, however, the thoroughness with which the questions were asked somehow convinced me the software was infact doing the right things. It did quite a few cool things that I liked - electronically downloaded W-2s and 1099's from a bunch of different online accounts, explained rental deductions, did a quick "audit risk" analysis, and came up with several, albeit trivial, ways to maximize deductions (although I did not benefit from any) . All in all, it was a worthwhile indulgence, one that saved me time if not money. My biggest dream these days is that I find that magic "bug" in Turbotax that will enable me to file a class-action on behalf of all those suckers who lost money using this wretched piece of software and thus get myself rich overnight!