Taxing

When I was in college and for a few years after, I used to wonder why people bitched so much about tax season.

It really wasn't that hard. The paperwork arrived, you filled in the numbers where it told you to, you plugged everything into a calculator, you double-checked it, and you either wrote a check or you anticipated one. Even if you went slow, it only took a couple of hours. Not fun, by any stretch, but hardly worthy of a collective, nationwide whine.

Then we acquired a house, and suddenly it became useful to itemize our deductions, since the interest we paid on our mortgage, by itself, was more than the standard deduction. That added a surprising amount of work to the process.

Then Matt got some stock options from work, and exercised them, and that paperwork nearly made us crazy. (It didn't help that the company's brokerage firm sent us, in their wisdom, non-standard reporting forms.) Luckily, that only happened twice.

Then we acquired kids, which got us additional exemptions, but added yet another form to the stack if we wanted to claim credit for what we paid in daycare. (There's a cap on this credit. We hit the cap every year. Every year, it seems to me that somewhere about five steps earlier on the form, it could just say, "Okay, you hit the cap, write this number down at the bottom and forget the rest.")

This year, we thought it might be worthwhile trying to see if we could claim any medical deductions. If you don't itemize your deductions, then medical claims work like this: If the amount you've paid for medical services and goods in the year is more than 7.5% of your take-home pay, then you get to claim everything over that 7.5% as a deduction. If you have a job and insurance and more or less normal medical needs, you're probably not going to get there -- up until this year, I never even bothered adding it up. I just wrote -0- on that line and moved on.

But this past year, we paid for my hospital stay for Alex's birth (the stay was in '07 but the bill hit in '08) and we paid for Penny's hospital stay for her diabetes diagnosis (including an emergency room visit, ambulance transport, and a night in ICU, none of which come cheap, even with insurance), and we paid for a year's worth of insulin and test strips and other diabetes supplies, and I went through allergy testing, which had a big fat co-pay, so it seemed to me that it just might be useful to add up our medical costs for the year to see if we could claim that deduction.

I spent about an hour organizing the receipts and bill stubs, and I gave up trying to use a calculator because I kept losing track of whether I'd hit the '+' key and I'd hit it twice (which on my calculator adds the previously-entered amount again) and... blah. I put it in a spreadsheet. Eventually, I finished adding up the total of the medical expenses I could prove, which came up to... about half of what we'd need to claim the deduction. I'm sure some doctor's visits and prescription refills got missed, but my total included all that big stuff I just listed, so anything I'd left out had no chance of doubling the amount I already hit. (If I'd come up within a few hundred of the goal, I would've scrounged around in my checkbook register and credit card statements to try to dig something up -- but there's no way I was going to find another couple thousand dollars in expenses.)

So there was an evening lost to the taxes, for no benefit whatsoever. And I understand a little better, now, the annual collective kvetching.