Taxing times

I like to think I'm pretty good with my money, but when it comes to doing my taxes I'm somewhat scared of the responsibility, because you know, IRS and all that scary crap. I've been especially scared to do my 2008 taxes because of the financial mess created by selling my house and transferring jobs and having my company pay for part of the relocation, so I put them off longer than usual so I could get help from my parents.

The Modern Mom and I sat down with Turbo Tax last night and started thumbing through all the W-2s and 1040s and B-52s and all that crap. I was already stressed out because I couldn't find a bunch of Goodwill receipts that I know I had at one point.

Turns out that was only the beginning.

I never received receipts from either of the churches I attended last year because I'm not sure either has my current address. So, we went through all my cancelled checks online and looked up each donation one by one.

Then we discovered that I never received documentation from the mortgage company on how much tax money I paid on the old house before I sold it, and boy oh boy that's a lot of deduction that I'm missing out on without that. By the way, did you know that you can't deduct anything from your taxes when you take a loss on selling your home to relocate? Yeah, F-U federal government for that one. That's a knife in the back that keeps on twisting.

Both of these mishaps are probably a result of me not actually living in my own home for six months and having four -- FOUR! -- different mailing addresses (two of which won't reach me anymore) in calendar year '08. I know I haven't been getting all my mail, despite putting in mail forwarding requests every step of the way. Lord knows what else is sitting in a dead mail pile somewhere with my name on it. And there's no telling whether any of the missing receipts got somehow caught up in the Modern Ex's papers or tossed while I was crashing at his place.

The taxes didn't get done, and now all I want to do is cry. I'm reliving the worst year of my life in the form of missing paperwork and relocation documents. I feel just like I felt then when everything was overly complicated and everything I needed was wherever I wasn't. I felt like I was finally done cleaning up last year's mess a few months ago, but now there's so much backtracking left to be done.

The lone comfort I'm taking from all of this is the simplicity I've achieved with my life this year. I know when this time rolls around next year, it won't be this difficult. One home, one job, one much, much happier Modern Gal.