Feeling productive today.  Got our taxes mostly done.  Is generally how I handle it.  Just get everything entered and then double check that tax forms match my records, as those forms come in.  Try to file before February.

I really miss the professional work software and how much time it saved me.  I've just been throwing tax projections into last year's software and then mentally tweaking what I know is different for the next year. It's not great but it's the most cost effective (and fast) way I can figure out how to do tax projections.

I had to share because when throwing all my numbers into tax software I was coming up with some large tax due at first.  Was kind of ignoring and figuring it would sort out as I entered more data.  Oh yeah, that extra $6K in medical expenses this year, ended up putting us massively over the standard deduction.  That did help.

Towards the end though I still had $2,000 shown due.  At the very end it was $2,001.  Did I mess thing up that bad?  Nope, I figured it out pretty quickly.  That last $2,000 was college tax credits.  Did I literally get our taxes down to the penny?  Er, down to $1?!  Holy cow!

I told MH to give me a gold star.  😁

In the end, I refined a couple of more deductions and so the taxes went down a bit.  The only estimate that remains is I threw in some investment dividends as 'taxable' and I know a lot of that will sort out to non-taxable (qualified dividends at 0% tax rate).    So that's the one thing I have to wait for to finalize.  Should get investment tax forms in 1-2 weeks.