Am I the only one excited that it's time to do my taxes?
Probably not, but I'm sure I'm in the minority. I love tax time. It's a bit of a game to me - to see if I can get the numbers just right so that I have a small refund. No tax free loans to the government for me! I mean, if I suddenly got a huge refund, I wouldn't be upset, though I would change around my withholding for 2010. But in an ideal world, I will come very close to zero.
If I'm honest with myself, I'm probably going to owe money. One of the downsides to being a saver with no mortgage (yet). That interest income starts to hurt, even though it's not all that much. I do a good job of tracking everything and taking every single deduction I can, but ultimately, I end up owing money. It's just a question of how much.
I'm pretty good on the federal tax side. It's the state taxes that tend to throw me off. So we'll see how things go! I use TurboTax and my copy arrives tomorrow. Of course, I don't have any of my paperwork yet, so I can't really get started, but it's still exciting.
How do you feel about tax time? Do you dread it? Put it off til the last minute? Do you use your tax refund as a savings method? I know people who purposefully have a chunk of money withheld because if they tried to just save it, they would end up spending it. Thus, even with the interest-free loan to the government, they have more money than they would otherwise. If that's what works for you, then it makes sense to me. Just make sure that if you're supposed to pay your taxes, you're paying them. Breaking the law is never good.