Sunday, February 3, 2008

Accounting

In filling out my 2007 income taxes, I realized that I've crossed that magical line of over-my-headedness where I easily see the value of having an accountant to just do all of this stuff for me. Before buying a house and selling stock, everything was simple. Really simple. I put a few numbers into boxes and then I knew how much money I was getting or how much I owed. The house part isn't so bad, but my goodness the rules for reporting stock purchases and sales are confusing. TurboTax has an "import from Fidelity" feature that is down right now, and I'm really hoping that that will magically figure out all of my numbers for me, because I've read and reread all of the documents and I'm still not sure if I have things correct. I have an idea of what I need to do, but it looks hideously tedious and would involve rummaging through a few years' worth of documents that I'd have to hunt down. I really don't want to do that.

Update: Their importer doesn't really work. Basically all it does is give you a bunch of boxes that you can fill in with numbers from your paper statements, but luckily that's all I needed. Entering that data knocked down my rebate by about a grand. :(

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