SeanDareOnline.com

Thursday night I grunted and swore through our 2007 income tax return. I hate paying taxes. Hate it! I will gladly give money to a church or charity, assuming the charity is worthy, but when it comes time to give money to the government I chafe at the pocket book.

Fortunately we are getting a refund this year. Actually we always get a refund, but this year is different. How? Because we are going to use our refund to pay off more of our debt. With the income tax refund we will get this year we estimate we will be able to reduce our debt pay off time by three months. This makes us debt free, except our house payment, by March 2009! Yeah!

In years past we would have spent that money on, well, I don’t know. It would go into the slush fund we called a checking account and by June we would wonder where it went. This brings up another great point Dave Ramsey speaks to in Financial Peace University, or FPU. Your money will go somewhere. Only if you have a plan for it will it go where you want it to go. Otherwise it will go to someone with a plan. Who has the best plans on the planet? Why the banks and credit card companies of course.

Okay, enough about Dave for today. On to a truly pleasant surprise I encountered while doing my taxes, Turbo Tax Deluxe. Earlier this year Jenn and I toyed around with doing our taxes online via H & R Block simply because it was cheaper than Turbo Tax. If you don’t know, H & R Block writes the Tax Cut software that is the only major competitor to Turbo Tax. What finally made me choose the more expensive option was a long history with Turbo Tax, which equates to a high level of comfort with them, and the benefit of keeping all my tax data on my computer instead of on H & R Block’s servers. I just don’t trust anyone else’s servers. I have good reasons for this. Look at all the financial institutions whose servers have been hacked and their customers data stolen. It happens all the time.

If you have used Turbo Tax in the past you will remember that the traditional system used an interview process to fill out your tax forms. Turbo Tax would ask you a question relating to a line on the tax return form, and, based on your response, it would fill in the appropriate information on the form. This system is useful, especially for someone who has never itemized their tax return before, but cumbersome and slow. The refreshing surprise in Turbo Tax this year was an option to either use the questionnaire, like years past, or to use the list of categories with drop downs. It may not sound that nice at first, but the benefits were huge to a long time Turbo Tax user like me. For each section of the tax return, such as Income or Deductions, I could look at a list of sub categories with last years tax return data in one column, and this years in the other. In a glance I could tell which sub categories had deductions last year for which I hadn’t added a deduction this year. This is a powerful new tool as most peoples tax return don’t change significantly from year to year. Sure the amounts might change, but the type of income and deductions typically don’t change from year to year. This means that if you know what areas you use from year to year you can fill in your taxes without going through questions for categories you don’t use.

The time savings was incredible. I used to spend anywhere from 7-9 hours filling out our tax return using the questionnaire based Turbo Tax. I also used to go over it 3-4 times over a one week period to make sure I had everything in there to the point where I felt comfortable. This year it took me 3 hours. That included reviewing my return three times. When I submitted my taxes Thursday night I felt confident that I had filled the return out correctly. That was quite a blessing.

How do you file your returns? Do you use a software program? If so, which one and why?

- Sean