Reflections on the income tax wars

Both income taxes are done, state and Fed.
Both are mailed as of tax-day, April 15, 2010.
That's because both were a little short; the Fed a small amount, and the state a tiny amount.
The ain't gettin' nuthin until it's due.
I do the taxes myself — I hear I'm one of the few that do.
It's not too hard; maybe six hours total.
I've tried various angles — worksheets — along the way, and usually we don't qualify.
The only angle that worked was reducing the taxable amount of our Social Security income.
I don't use TurboTax®, which I call TubbieTax.
It requires more than I need, and what I do is aimed at what I need.
I have two separate computer spreadsheets that total -a) income, and -b) itemized deductions.
The first totals our income from Social Security and pensions; the second our itemized deduction amounts.
The first should equal our 1099s, and second are entries on each line of federal Schedule A.
Doing the income tax is fairly simple, although I usually try various angles.
That's what eats up time.
Just the same, income tax was done later this year.
The Fed was done a week ago, and the state finished on tax-day. —Actually the state was done the night before, but finished on tax-day.
Now that we're retired, we find ourselves swamped with errands and medical appointments, etc.
We wonder at times how we managed when we worked.
Finding time to do the income tax was a struggle.
Working out at the YMCA was scotched, and lawn-mowing put on hold.
Walking our dog became almost impossible.
A medical appointment also had to be done.
That chewed up at least four hours.
Both the state and the Fed have advanced to fillable PDFs.
That was a couple years ago, but at first your completed tax-form wasn't savable.
All that was savable was the unfilled PDF.
My workaround was to not turn off my computer — keep the filled-in file open.
If I needed to edit, I only wanted to edit that one item, not fill in the whole form again.
My wife helps me.
She fills in the PDFs from my penciled trials.
“Progress,” I said. “They've made the PDFs savable.”
But not everything.
Not the summarization of 1099s for the state.
Everything else was savable, but I had to keep the 1099 summarization open — form IT-1099-R.
“I've noted they've made other tiny advancements,” my wife observed.
“Your Social Security numbers carry over on each page of IT-201, plus the amount of your tax also carries over.
So why can't they make the forms do simple calculations — like addition and subtraction? And thereby avoid errors..... Why do you hafta use a calculator?”
Yeah, right! My spreadsheets are totaling each column; a simple function.
Probably somebody suggested that, and were shut down by some bureaucrat.
Heaven forbid income tax advance into the new century.
A couple weeks ago a financial advisor set about consolidating all my separate retirement accounts into a single account.
He used my wife's spreadsheet.

• “We” is me and my wife of 42+ years ,“Linda.”
• I work out in the Canandaigua YMCA exercise-gym. (“Canandaigua” [“cannon-DAY-gwuh”] is a small city to the east 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.)
• Our current dog is “Scarlett;” a rescue Irish-Setter. She’s almost five, and is our sixth Irish-Setter. (A “rescue Irish Setter” is an Irish Setter rescued from a bad home; e.g. a puppy-mill. By getting a rescue-dog, we avoid puppydom, but the dog is often messed up.)
• “PDF” is Portable-Document-Format, essentially a computer-file that can't be changed. —Except fillable PDFs, onto which stuff can be entered.
• “1099” is a statement of pension income. The forms, and W-2s, are not actually attached to our state income tax. They are summarized on a form — i.e. the taxpayer does it instead of the income tax people. That way the state tax department can reduce staff.