Praise the Lord and Pass the TurboTax

It has been almost exactly five months without a blog, and lots of stuff has happened. None, however, is quite as pleasing has having finished and filed the 2005 Federal Income Tax. Woohoo! Well, maybe better was the fact that for the first time in 20 years we are getting a REFUND. WOOOOOHOOOOO!! Enough of a refund to pay for the twenty day rental of the RV for the Alaska trip in May, with enough left over to pay for Bubba's stay at Kamp Kimbrough.

TurboTax was even more awesome this year because it easily imported last year's info and was really cheap because Vanguard investors get a discount. Only paid $21.20 including tax for the premier edition with FREE e-filing. It also imported all the investment information from Vanguard. Does Chuck S. do this for his clients, H?

The only glitch came with Intuit's program for donations called ItsDeductable. It gives values for hundreds of items one might donate, summarizes them, and exports the results to TurboTax. Unfortunately, if one donates more than $500 worth of goods, one must itemize each item. This is done when using the ItsDeductable program, but only totals for each charity are exported. When I got to the end of TurboTax, I got an error stating that I needed to itemize the gift of goods. This caused me to have to enter the information twice. And this was at about 11:15 last night when I was already tired. But the end was definitely in sight, so I finished about 11:40.

Yeah me.