Catch-up and Mustard

Every once in awhile, we are fortunate enough to get a call from Alesha's mom asking us to join them for dinner. As broke college students (and yes, that's us now!), we couldn't turn down the opportunity to join them for dinner at Timber Lodge. What we weren't expecting was Alesha's brother to join us. It was fun to laugh at Big Lebowski and Transformers references and have my wife sigh and shake her head the whole time.

This weekend was significant because I got most of the 2007 taxes sorted through and taken care of. Believe it or not, we are only missing about 3 documents, most of which we are planning to have by the time we mail it off at the end of the week. I'm glad we were somewhat organized; it probably took 15-20 hours to get everything together over the past couple of weeks.

Which brings us to Taxes 2008: The Sequel. My dad is doing some work for H&R Block this year. Right around the beginning of January he let us know we could get a friends-and-family discount if we wanted. "That's okay, Dad! Alesha has a family member do it for her every year. We're good to go!"

Well, that was before our return fell into the pre-audit pile. We both realized that Alesha's tax returns have changed a lot since she was single and filing the standard deduction. We figured we needed to sit down with someone and go over taxes, and it wasn't going to be convenient to have someone whose office was over an hour away. We decided to bite the bullet and go with TurboTax. Some people like TurboTax more than others.



I've used TurboTax in the past and I am pretty comfortable using it. What I didn't realize was that it now has an online version. Since you don't have to pay until the end, I decided to punch in some numbers and see what our refund would be. I go so into it, I ended up just doing all of our taxes. I really liked it!

...until we got to the point where we needed to pay for it. Since Alesha is doing a Creative Memories business, we went with the Home & Business edition. At the end of the process I was informed that it would cost $110 to file our taxes. Just out of curiosity I checked what it would cost to buy online; it turns out the answer is $69.99. I will be ordering that tonight.

Speaking of money, there was an interesting story on Politico about the stimulus package that was just passed. Here is the quote from the video:

Suppose you spent $1 million every single day starting from the day Jesus was born — and kept spending through today. A million dollars a day for more than 2,000 years. You would still have spent less money than Congress just did.