Procrastination Pays!

Ok, so we don't like to do taxes. I'm sure everyone else feels this way, but we hate it so much that we always procrastinate it until the day before. Every year we swear that we'll just hire a good accountant, and every year we procrastinate that too.

In February, I entered all of our W2's in our tax software that we use every year, "TaxAct". I found out that we owed nearly $900. That was all I needed to procrastinate this out until the last minute. It isn't that we couldn't pay the tax bill...I just hate the idea of the IRS having our cash any earlier than the deadline.

So I procrastinated and decided that we'd take care of it this weekend. Then the weekend came, and you guessed it, I procrastinated it until tonight. So finally I got myself all frustrated and stressed out and sought to hit the complete button on the tax software. When I was completing the final steps, the software fizzled out with a "servers are down for maintenance" error. I was so STRESSED. Of course this would happen at the last minute.

In an act of utter frustration, I wandered to TurboTax.com. I groaned realizing that we were going to have to pay nearly double to do our taxes. Taxact is cheap, but I knew that TurboTax would not let their servers "go down for maintenance" on such an important tax day. While I frustratingly reentered all of our information, CJ was busy at work cleaning the house and rearranging the pantry.

Long story short, TurboTax helped me find new deductions and we ended up getting a combined federal and state REFUND of $880! My stress turned into pure joy as I realized that instead of paying Uncle Sam this year, he was going to pay me. :) A very stressful tax night ended up turning out really well. Here's to procrastination! This time it really paid off.

Oh, and as a side note....we'll never be using a discount tax software again. Shame on TaxAct for missing all of those deductions and for having website issues the day before taxes are due.

And I thought I would include a picture of our newly clean and organized pantry. CJ has a real knack for organization. The "before" pantry was very disorganized, so I was really appreciative of him taking care of this for us.