What Made you Smile/What Ticked you off Today?

[REPO Man]

Called to make an appointment to get my taxes done and the person who does that won't be available until March 7th. Surgery and recovery, if you have to ask.

Got my Dario Argento 2022 Calendar, with each month a different poster from a different Argento film...

...literally less than a week before February ends...

...and roughly six weeks after I ordered it from a seller on Amazon based out in New Zealand.

But they do great work. I bought my calendar from them last year. It was a calendar based on posters of zombie movies. After 2021 ended I just took my favorite posters and now I'm planning on mounting them. And next year I'll do the same for the Dario Argento calendar.

Hopefully I'll remember to order 2023's calendar much earlier.

Also, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla is free-to-play for the next few days. It's the first (mainline) AC game I played since the first one, and unlike the first one I actually like it.

[marurun]

Surgery and recovery, if you have to ask.

Why on earth are you sharing this bit? It's someone else's health information, and while we don't have a name (thankfully), that's just inappropriate.

Also, I hope you're getting your taxes done for free. You probably make little enough you should be able to file for free no problem.

[opa]

For real. Taxes ain't rocket science. Most of the free tax programs (h&r, turbo, etc) are really intuitive and easy to use.

[prfsnl_gmr]

J1 workers to staff a supermarket? Grim.

This is pretty common in that part of NC, actually. The reason? IT’S THE BEACH!!!

The student workers generally get inexpensive housing, help the local businesses handle a 3-month tourism surge, and get to live and play at the beach all summer. From what I’ve seen, they seem to be having a pretty good time…

Also…yeah…taxes aren’t rocket science, and since REPO is a grown man, he should be doing them himself. I’m sure he’ll have a really good excuse as to why he just can’t, though. (It’ll probably relate to his extensive offshore holdings and depreciable assets.)

[Limewater]

Last year, out of curiosity, I did my taxes twice.
For the first time ever, I did my federal taxes completely on paper, using the official IRS instructions. My taxes aren't crazy complicated, but I am pretty sure they are above average in complexity for the typical USAian W-2 employee who does not own a business.
My wife also did the same.
I then did them again using freetaxusa (very easy- I plan on using them again this year). That's what I actually filed.

What I found interesting was that, while they took great effort to make instructions clear, going through the instructions was still pretty complicated. At times I found myself three-deep in forms as the instructions for one form send me to another form with its own instruction book which sent me to another form with its own instruction book. I am pretty analytical and pretty good with instructions, and I do my own taxes every year, so I know what's going on, but I would say that it was still somewhat difficult to keep everything straight and could understand people giving up.
But what really stood out to me was, despite the relative complexity of the instructions, at no point do they assume that you have more than about a third or fourth-grade understanding of mathematics.

I may be wrong, but I believe that the set of people who can successfully follow all of the instructions for filing income tax on paper but also need that level of hand-holding for the calculations is extremely small.

[marurun]

That said, if you have a retirement portfolio that isn't just a straight-up 401k or 403b taxes can be a hot mess, which is why I pay for software which can import documents from my bank. And I still have to call my retirement guy usually once per tax cycle to ask "WTF do I do with this particular number?"

Honestly, free tax filing these days, though companies have tried to obscure those options, is pretty robust.

[REPO Man]

I just don't want to fuck up my taxes.

[stickem]

Between getting covid, a stomach bug and food poisoning the last 3 weeks, I'm about over feeling like crap. I'm not used to getting sick and dropping all this weight and not being able to eat right. Luckily. I just lost taste/smell but dam it really did a number on my appetite.

[MrPopo]

That said, if you have a retirement portfolio that isn't just a straight-up 401k or 403b taxes can be a hot mess, which is why I pay for software which can import documents from my bank. And I still have to call my retirement guy usually once per tax cycle to ask "WTF do I do with this particular number?"

Honestly, free tax filing these days, though companies have tried to obscure those options, is pretty robust.

Even then it shouldn't be complicated, as long as you have your cost basis tracked (which doesn't always happen in the forms due to some weird IRS regulations around ESPPs).

That said, I do think the real problem is with how the forms are written, rather than the concepts. Last year I accidentally forgot to mark a Trad IRA contribution as post-tax prior to converting it to Roth (backdoor Roth). I realized I made that error when I was reviewing the forms late in the year to give someone an example of how something unrelated is recorded. So I had to file an amended return, and California requires those to be by mail (whereas federal amendeds can now be e-filed). And double checking the form to make sure everything lined up I was struck by just how needlessly complex the wording is on it, when all they are trying to get is how much money I put in pre and post tax, and how much I converted and the ratio of pre and post tax dollars (since it pro-rates).

[SamuraiMegas]

I haven't mentioned this on here, but my mom was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. Yesterday I smoked a joint with her for the first time to help with her chemo side effects. That was definitely a weird experience, just a couple years ago I was getting threatened with being kicked out for smoking