Taxes

Inspired by the other Dave I sorted out my taxes tonight. Unlike Dave, I couldn’t really get H&R Block to work (since it determined I was in a special situation being a H1B alien and all), but after surfing a bit on IRS.gov I found a link to Turbo Tax which rocked. I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

After about 60 minutes of my time and the parting of $29.95, I had electronically submitted my federal tax papers and printed a copy of my Massachusetts tax papers for snailmail submission (for some reason, the Mass papers couldn’t be submitted electronically).

One really funny question during filling out forms and answering questions in Turbotax (btw, the UI wasn’t that bad actually), was whether I wanted to pay the optional 5.85% instead of the ordinary 5.3% Massachusetts income tax. TurboTax said that it was unclear why one would want to do that (go figure), so I opted for no. I later found some rather funny commentary on the subject . Anyway, the bottom line is that I’m getting about 70% of my US taxes paid in 2004 back. w00t!

Now to look into sorting out my Danish tax filings. Not so w00t!