Ah, April!
Mon., April 14, 11:08 AM
There are loads of reasons to be happy it’s April. By April I am no longer getting up in the dark, even though it’s Daylight Saving Time. The solar clock realizes that the time changed (several weeks ago, of course) and corrects itself too. The Cheesebox is losing its wintertime chill, and I can go into the cellar and garage without a hat and coat.
It’s getting warm enough to start riding the trike again. There was another sign from above. On the day that both the trike and I went “arse over teakettle,” thanks to the roots under the driveway, a paving contractor we know just happened to be working next door… By this time next week, we’ll be able to ride smoothly over the drive.
The media is full of income tax references. There are ads for accountant firms and “tips” from the IRS. “Cathy” is going through her annual travail with her accountant.
Me, I’m just letting it all go by. The refund was direct-deposited in our checking account about a month ago. I’ll take what I can get; it was about half of our annual property tax. (Such payments come out of my savings account; otherwise we couldn’t pay them.) But I thought back to the first time I ever filed income tax — fifty years ago, April 1958 for 1957. I believe I had a refund that year too, because my summer job had been for a charity and there was some kind of a change in what they were supposed to withhold… Whatever.
For the next forty years or so, I did my own taxes and then our joint taxes. For several years I did my parents’ taxes too. I tried Turb0Tax about seventeen years ago, but it really was not yet ready for general use. On the other hand, when I discovered Excel, it was like a gift. I have been using it to balance checkbooks and track expenses for quite a while.
Meanwhile, U.D. had a friend whose parents were C.P.A.’s. They did her taxes for nothing, based on the girls’ friendship. I continued to do ours myself, ’cause it’s sort of fun after a while, but it got complicated. First Husband, then both of us, retired, collecting social security and other non-wage income, and the laws were confusing. So I’ve been using the C.P.A. firm too; I still use Excel to collect the figures and present them all ready to process. All I have to do is wait for the 1099 forms, and we’re ready to roll.
Wouldn’t you know that it was too good to be true? The VA requested our income figures for last year — in the middle of January. I wrote and told them that was not possible because the payers don’t report before the end of January. Without reading my explanation, they sent a threatening letter; they would cut off Husband’s prescriptions. By the time I had sent them in, they wouldn’t even print out his upcoming appointments. The woman in charge of payments told me she would not have them in hand until about two weeks after I sent them. I cobbled something together and faxed it to her.
I have this niggling suspicion that someone is wasting my taxes.
