Are There Any Benifits to Filing Joint Taxes?
Since the deadline for taxes in now less than a month away my wife and I have finally gotten our tax documents in order. For the past two years I have done my taxes myself. For the 2004 tax year I used Turbo Tax and it worked quiet well. The only issue I had with the program was that I was not able to use a lot of the automatic deductions that it would try to find for me.
The following year since I didn’t find Turbo Tax overly helpful I just did my taxes for 2005 with pencil and paper. For a single guy with no reason to itemize it was very straight forward. It did feel a little odd to be using paper after filing the prior years return on-line.
This year will be different. I will be having a “tax professional” preparing our joint tax return for 2006. There are two reasons for this:
- The main reason is my wife and I will be filing a joint return this year since we were married at the end of 2006. My wife’s job enables us to use some deductions that I do not know very. To complicate this, in my wife’s quest to keep our tiny apartment clean she also tends to throw everything out. Because of this we do not have many receipts or records of a lot of the expenses that I think we will need. In an attempt to keep my sanity I will let a professional try to figure the mess out.
- The second reason and just as important is that this year happens to be one of the busier years of my training. Attempting to read new sections of the tax code while being sleep deprived doesn’t strike me as a good idea.
Hopefully after this return is done and when my schedule returns to something resembling normal I will be able to do our 2007 return without any help.
