Near Tax Error

I started doing my Federal Taxes last night. Ran into a few problems. I use TurboTax software. It could not find last year's tax return. Oh yeah. My computer hard drive got hosed. So I had to key in a bunch of stuff manually. My other problem was that a lot of companies did not send me the forms I needed to fill in all the details. That meant I had to look stuff up manually. That took a lot of time.

Finally tonight I decided to look everything up that I needed. Got to the point where I started working on my state tax return as well. Used TurboTax state edition to tackle it. Everything seemed to be going well. I was receiving a tax refund on both my federal and state taxes. Bazinga. Now it was time to actually file. I printed out my returns. I file by mailing in paper forms. No need to make it easy for anyone to audit me.

I had gone as far as adressing the envelope and stapling my W-2 to the tax return. Then I looked through all the forms one more time. I found a form missing! And that missing form meant I was not getting the full refund I deserve. I checked the main form, and I was indeed short about $1000.

I ran upstairs and went through the return with TurboTax again. That's when I found my mistake. I put a large number in a wrong column. After fixing the mistake, TurboTax recomputed my federal and state refunds. Both were going up. Yee-haw. Almost made a $1000 mistake. Now I could always have gone back and filed an amended tax return. But that is messy. Got to get it right the first time around.

Should get my refund within a month or two. Then we can finally start plans for getting a jet bath tub installed in the basement. We have wanted one for as long as we have been in this house. It might just be time this year to get it done.