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Tax & Money Management
Early February is a good time to gather together all of your
tax related documents: W-2s, 1099s, medical and other receipts. This way if
anything is missing, or the numbers don't seem correct, you'll have plenty of
time to get duplicate copies or corrections made.
If you usually get a refund, don't stop now - the
sooner you get the returns filed the sooner you'll get your money back. Even if
you owe money and won't be filing until the last minute, it's a good idea to do
a dry run early, so you're not caught with some missing information just hours
before the deadline. Similarly, if you'll be filing electronically with one of
the software packages listed below, the computers on the other end can be pretty
bogged down as that deadline approaches - it's not prudent to expect to hit send
at one minute to midnight.
Organization
A shoebox full of crumpled paper is one way
to stay organized throughout the year - a method sure to have you pulling your
hair out in early April each year. Better to use one of these money management
programs and set-up categories to group transactions as they occur:
From what I've seen, both of the above programs are comparable
in operation and features and both have considerable resources available on the
Internet for researching and tracking various financial facts. If you use a lot
of other Microsoft products such as Office Money may be a logical choice, otherwise there's no clear-cut advantage
to one over the other. They're both available in multiple configurations with
the deluxe packages offering a number of additional features over the standard -
worth a few dollars more. Preparation Software
If you have simple wage income from a single employer,
it's possible to fill in the forms that come in the mail by hand, but many/most
of us will use a tax preparer or software package to accomplish this annual
task. Either choice will be more likely to catch any potential errors and
letting someone else do the dirty work, or answering a few questions and
watching the software print it out or zap it off to the IRS is a lot more fun
than manual labor at the kitchen table.
Any of the tax software programs will get the job done with the data from
finance programs above without any significant problems, i.e. you don't have to choose TurboTax just
because you use Quicken from the same publisher. Preparation Online
Taking it step further, you can prepare your returns online rather
than installing the programs on your own hard drive.
Government Resources
There is a wealth of information available at both the
Federal and State level. These two links will bring you to their gateway pages
to all the information available:
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