Just to let everyone know that I'm not participating in the April fool-a-thon. It's against my religion: sucker.
NT was actually a legendary practical joker among his friends back in England, and after he'd regaled us with several tales of his best pranks, I made him promise (repeatedly) that he would leave that part of his life behind him when he moved in! My poor heart can't take it!
Today I finally heard from my tax guy. He had a few questions that made me think "oh crap, I didn't even know I needed to provide that information." NT's UK bank account numbers. The price he bought the flat for originally. The amount in his UK savings account. What we owed on MN taxes last year. I'm just hoping most of this stuff is information you need to file that won't actually affect my past two tax years. I can only imagine the domino effect of revising all the numbers, because everything is so intertwined. I feel pretty exhausted just from getting that info and worrying. He should finish up pretty soon and said he'd be able to get me the documents in plenty of time to turn them around to the IRS.
I just want to know whether we owe, but every time we talk there's so much other info to pass back and forth, I just don't feel like muddying the waters. Not when nothing's final yet anyway.
Actually he just called back to find out when NT started renting the flat, and I asked him then whether he thought we were going to have to go back and provide the IRS with all this info for past years. He said he didn't think it would be an issue but that he wanted to get everything finalized before he said before. Some relief, but still uncertainty. Yeesh. And I still don't even know how much we're going to be charged for this whole preparation process.
To take my mind off all this, I've been tooling around the web making tentative plans for a THIRD trip this year--hopefully in late August/early September! I'm not going to book anything yet, because who knows how bad this tax bill is going to be--NT mentioned yesterday that we could do a "staycation" instead of the trip we're thinking about, if we need to put our vacation money toward taxes. It's a good option, and we can always do this trip another year. It's nothing too dazzling, just a train trip to a couple of U.S. cities with some nice hotels and a rental car thrown in. I'm looking forward to it, but it can wait if we need to economize, and plus I won't feel deprived since we'll have already had two trips this year, which is our usual number for the past couple years. Staycations are really fun too, and way cheaper.
OK, my nerves are calming down. However bad it is, once I know more, I can take steps to make sure no other tax years are this stressful or expensive.
No foolin'
April 1st, 2011 at 10:02 pm
April 1st, 2011 at 10:05 pm 1301695525
April 1st, 2011 at 11:05 pm 1301699156
April 2nd, 2011 at 02:06 am 1301710007
Good luck with the taxes! DH sold his UK flat a couple years ago, and we had nightmares about the taxes, but they weren't that bad. I'm doing our US taxes this weekend--always a riot of fun.