Forms due on the 15th and some comments

One downside to writing posts but not publishing them immediately is the identifiers of time. When I first drafted this, I said today because some of the events happened on that day. Now I have to change it to this week. On the plus side, I was able to come up with better phrasing in one part and learned some details to expand upon a point.

Due last week
Last week I filed paperwork to continue an alumni group with the University of California. The group has done absolutely nothing, but they have a website, working online signup form, Facebook group, and official recognition by the Cal Alumni Association. For reasons unknown to me, the California Alumni Association became the Cal Alumni Association recently. I had to change the name in a dozen places on the website (make that 18, I just found another place) and need to find a new graphic.

If you do visit the site linked above, take a minute to look at the people sitting behind the table. I am putting their pictures on an online milk carton. One has not posted on her blog for over a month and the link to the other's blog does not work :( I know where they are in real life, but they are missing from the blogosphere.

Next month
Now I am working on my taxes. Last year I did them without TurboTax or any other preparation software. This year I am going to continue the tradition. If I can get into the habit of doing taxes without software now, when my finances get more complicated in the future I will be able to handle them better.

In January I knew I needed to get three 1099 forms for my interest and dividend income. I received two of them in January and waited for the third one. As of earlier this week it was not in my possession; so I started a search. After looking through my bank's website and asking my Dad if the form had been directed to him, I learned something. If interest income on a bank account is less than $10, the bank will not send a 1099-INT and the interest income does not need to be reported. After checking online, my interest income for last year was $7.22.

Later on I observed a second interesting thing. My 1099-DIV did not list an account that had no dividends or distributions. I would have guessed the company would have listed the account and said it generated no income, but it omitted the account entirely.

Being a civic citizen
Doing your taxes by hand (without tax preparation software) is a good exercise to understand the government. Taxes show you what behaviors a government wants to encourage or discourage. It also shows how complicated it is to navigate the thousands of pages of regulation and rules. There was a time when we professed a government of the people, by the people, for the people. When I am doing my taxes, it looks like a government of the bureaucrats, by the lawyers, for the accountants.

Recent legislation is taking us further down the wrong path. Under a new law, people will soon have to talk about their health insurance when filing taxes. People who are able to buy health insurance but chose not to will be fined (but not "criminalized") by the IRS. You would have to be a slick lawyer to invent a justification for this.

I would like to recognize Derek for doing his taxes by hand. We need more people with that old-fashioned attitude.