DONE

Our Federal income-tax is DONE, I guess.
It's entered on PDFs for proofing.
I do it myself.
My feeling is I shouldn't hafta pay a preparer.
I do it with the help of this here computer.
But not TurboTax® or its equivalent.
Our taxes are essentially on our income minus our itemized deductions, so I keep track of both on two computer spreadsheets I made.
I keep track of this stuff throughout the year.
So essentially my spreadsheet totals are entered on our tax-forms.
It's much easier — and faster — than tracking everything for TurboTax.
TurboTax seems to want individual amounts for each charity.
Why bother when Schedule A wants only the total charity figure?
I suppose this is because some charitable donations qualify, and some don't.
All ours qualify, so my computer spreadsheet just adds 'em all up.
I just plug my spreadsheet totals into our Schedule A.
Our amount withheld is another manifestation of math trickery.
Our amount withheld is per month: deductions from our Social Security and my wife's pension.
My disability pension from Regional Transit is so small I don't deduct from it.
What I do is divide my previous year's taxes by 12, and make our monthly deductions equal that.
I used to do this when we both worked.
We had to add an additional deduction to the exemption amount, so I'd multiply the exempted amount times 26 to see how short we were. (We were getting paid biweekly.)
I'd then divide that shortage by 26, and that was our additional deduction per paycheck.
Since income is now monthly instead of biweekly, I now use 12.
This works pretty good.
We owe the Feds a small amount.
Better this than them owing me 89 bazilyun dollars for money they never paid me interest on.
People think a tax-refund is a windfall.
Not in my humble opinion — not when they don't pay me interest on it.
Better I should owe a small amount then them make like bandits.
Every excess of funds I have pays interest; why shouldn't they?
—Now for the State; a process made difficult because of their refusal to send me a tax-booklet.
I hafta online their tax-chart.
What about Granny without a computer?
And then there's their making me summarize all my income.....
No W-2s or 1099s attached to my NY income-tax.
They don't pay me for that!
Slough it all off on the taxpayer — or his preparer.
A while ago, when I worked at the mighty Mezz, their W-2 didn't give all the information needed for the state's IT-2.
I just wrote “not available” on it.
With fear the NY State Police would be monitoring my house from antenna-festooned Econolines.
The state could just deal with it.
They want information that isn't there, I'm gonna write “not available.”
So the Feds get paper; not E-File yet.
Something about “Free-File” was mentioned.
Something about cranking numbers into computer forms, and filing that electronically.
I'll look into it, but not this late.
Maybe next year, Free-File.
Would that the State would do that — maybe it has, but everything seems to be secret.
As far as I can see, the current regime for electronic filing of my state income-tax is some variation of TurboTax, and I get to fork over a fee.
No thank you!
If I can Free-File the Feds, I should be able to Free-File the State.
Why should I pay someone to pay my taxes?
Actually, the Fed went pretty well.
About two hours so far; and no quixotic hairballs of note.
The only hairball so far is PDF page-numbers not corresponding to form page-numbers.
So that printing page 11 was actually page 10 of the forms.
I had to print page 12 to get page 11.
And at long last they made the filled-in PDFs savable.
Mind-boggling progress.

• My wife of 42+ years is “Linda.”
• RE: “Disability pension from Regional Transit.......” —I had a stroke October 26, 1993, and retired on disability from Regional Transit Service in Rochester, NY, where I drove transit-bus for 16&1/2 years (1977-1993). RTS is the supplier of transit-bus service in the greater Rochester area and surrounding environs. It's publicly funded.
• The “mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired over four years ago. Best job I ever had. (“Canandaigua” [“cannon-DAY-gwuh”] is a small city nearby where we live in Western NY. The city is also within a rural town called “Canandaigua.” The name is Indian, and means “Chosen Spot.” —It’s about 15 miles away.)
• Ford “Econoline” van.
• “E-File” is electronic tax filing, over the Internet.
• RE: “They made the filled-in PDFs savable......” —Previously a filled-in PDF could not be saved; it just saved the PDF, not your fillins. Now filled-in PDFs can be saved. (“Save-As......”)