Yes, I know you don’t have to file until April. But lets face it, if you wait to get your ducks in order until then you’ll be scrambling all over the place.
Now I don’t have any great tax wisdom to pass out. To be honest, we use the short form. But I did get an interesting claim via a forwarded email the other day that was actually supported by Snopes (the internet’s clearing house for urban myths).
Apparently the Federal Excise tax on telephone service was revoked but continued to be charged for some period of time, or something like that. Maybe it was repealed and there was some retroactive period which is being refunded. The long and short of it is that basically most people will qualify for a special one time payment of $30 or $60. It may not be big money, but hey, all you have to do is fill out a line on your taxes to get it. So head on over and check it out!
Thanks for sharing this. My taxes, too, are pretty simple; I don’t know if I would have caught this or not.
Happy Weekend (I’m looking for an empty one in February or March to kick everyone out of the house so I can do my taxes).
Thanks for the info!
You know, I know most of us are loathe to do it the long way, but if you keep your phone reciepts, it’s worth going through and adding up the actual tax paid. Especially if, like me, you’re single with High-speed internet, a cell phone, and a land line.
Along those lines, I recommend that everyone do the long form. Spend the $20 and buy a tax-preparation program, which makes it easy. But if you always do the short form, you’ll never know if you could have saved more doing the long one.
Since I’m a WAH person I do the long form and we’ve been discussing this for a couple of months.