YakShaving

I know it seems ridiculous: I haven’t done my taxes yet. Even though I’m the founder and partner of a personal finance education business, I still haven’t had the time to sit down and enter in a bunch of numbers into a stupid software program in order to get money back from the government. What a bass-ackwards system, gosh! Anyway, my excuse is that I’ve just been busy with other stuff lately. When haven’t I been? BTW, I finally dug out Blue Ocean Strategy out and cleaned the dust off it, so I will be posting takeaways soon.

In the past I have either used TaxCut or wrote my taxes out by hand. Both outdated processes, in my opinion. Now, I’ve switched to using this spreadsheet that this Excel guru creates every year.

Its perfect because it is not a wizard (I have always hated using wizards, because the inner geek in me feels the need for control and power over any document or piece of code I create)… And also it allows me to create a Schedule D with the utmost simplicity… Which is really the most time consuming part of doing my taxes. All I have to do is go to my brokerage account and download my history (dividends, buys/sells). I can then stratify these numbers and create a simple formula to prepare the Schedule D (st/lt cap gains) and Schedule B (interest/dividends). Even lame taxcut can’t do that.

The only downside of this mechanism is that I can’t e-File. Not a big deal really… I can wait a few weeks for my return… Heck, I’ve waited this long! Oh, the other small downside is that I’d have to have a separate state return filed separately and it doesn’t automatically populate details from my federal return. Now that I think about it, it wouldn’t be too difficult to create a spreadsheet for my state like this guy did. Maybe I should do that..