Monday, April 14, 2008

Yeah, the Taxes are Filed!

It's 12:45 in the morning on Monday morning (Sunday night) and the taxes are finally e-filed! I have despised tax season the last 3 years because of the business. Last year, I actually had to take a whole week off of work to pull everything together and do them because I hadn't kept up on the bookkeeping part of it and so I had to do all of that before I could file them. It was very similar this year in that I hadn't kept up very well and had to go back and do all the record-keeping stuff before I could finish the business section of the taxes. But, luckily, I had developed a very easy system for pulling the data in from my files and so it didn't take as long, even though there were many more files to pull in. Plus, add in that I've been sick for over 2 weeks now and it really made for a fun time. At least they are done now. I have to say that I love Turbo Tax. It's fun to watch the refund/tax due indicator in the top corner as you go through the program and enter your information. One minute, we were getting a nice little refund. Then, I enter a bunch of the income stuff from the business and it went to us owing a huge amount of money. Then, I got to enter all of the business expenses and it slowly started to head back to a refund (albeit not as big of one as before, but a refund still the same).

Clint and I have been talking about how we would put our refund to work for us if we got one. We have been diligently working to becoming entirely debt free. Luckily for us, we were able to pay off all of our debt except our house and my truck when we sold his house when we got married. We have had the truck just over 2 years and it's half paid off, which is such a blessing to us. We were quite upside down on it at the beginning because I was upside down on the van when we traded it in but we really felt it was important to get rid of the van. We made double payments on the truck right from the beginning and it really helped. We've decided to take all of the money we set aside for the additional taxes we might owe because of the business and pay it on the truck, along with our government rebate check we'll be getting. Then, that should pay it down enough that if we increase the amount of our twice monthly payments just a bit, that we actually should get it paid off by next Sept or Oct - just a little over a year from now. Then, we'll only have our house to pay off. I can't wait until the day that is paid off too!

It's been so great having Jen and the boys here. She has been so helpful, especially in my time of need. I am so grateful for her. More on all of our time together later. Off to bed - have to get up early in the a.m. and go to work for my one day this week, before we head off to San Diego for sun and surf.

1 comment:

Jodi said...

we do turbo tax too. I love watching the refund amount. Our taxes is always in the owing and works up slowly to getting a little back. The tithing deduction is the main thing to being able to get a tax refund for us.