Taxes - DONE!

Yes, you read that correctly, our taxes are done. A few years ago we did or taxes in early February. The last two years we did them in mid March. This year we waited until, well, yesterday to get started. Yeesh, April 7 is not the best time to start your taxes. Waht if we were missing a form? Fortunately we had everything and finished them yesterday as well. Yes, finished - in all of 1.5 hours.

I remember slaving over my first few sets of income taxes sweating whether or not I got the details right and the numbers in the right spots. I was a student and worked, and only had one W-2, but man oh man it took me HOURS to get those forms filled out. And I remember my Dad setting aside a full weekend to do his and mom's taxes for years. At some point though I got married, started working regular jobs, had investments, had kids, and our taxes got complicated. We struggled with those early forms, not knowing exactly if we filled everything in in the right spot or not. Then along came our savior TurboTax online.

We are now able to complete our taxes in all of about an hour (last night it took longer due to some debate on accrual methods for my business). This wonderful program pulls in the info from the prior year, goes through step by step and asks if there are changes, and is easy enough for someone who is tax impaired (like me) to navigate it properly. I can't imagine how long it would take us to do our taxes by hand - or why on earth anyone would even think of doung that these days. Computers are our friend, and that mass of paper that TurboTax filled out for us, well, I might just want to marry it.