<p>I’m happier. It’s going to be a long process as I have a lot of stuff to go through. Basically a few hours a week but it will be fun watching the number of boxes go away. Something else that I’m doing is tossing books. Basically stuff that’s old, that I haven’t read in a long time, stuff related to the kids’ educations that they know so they don’t need books for, stuff that is in books that’s now free on the web.</p>
<p>It’s hard to adjust to the digital world with old habits but there are a LOT of benefits to it. I’m also going to digitize the kids’ college stuff to get it out of boxes and onto their laptops.</p>
<p>I’d like to convince my wife to cut down her huge collection of shoes and clothes too. Same with the kids and this has been ongoing with me and my weight loss.</p>
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<p>Well, it was simple for me. Up until last year. Actually, I should go back and check several other years as I had some really big dividend years in the past. I might have a bunch of foreign tax credit carryovers that I don’t know about. They’re good for ten years.</p>
<p>Edit: I found an additional $1,300 in foreign tax credit carryovers from relatively recent past years. I’ll have to think about this but it’s nice to know. BTW, this is one reason why it’s worth it to buy TurboTax over the free tax software guys. It keeps track of all of this stuff for you.</p>
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<p>Yeah, sometimes you wind up spending 20 hours on a couple of forms because you made a few hundred dollars on something. Sometimes it isn’t worth it.</p>
<p>I had that problem with a company a long time ago. They recorded my 401K shares as being taxable. That was a lot of fun to deal with. In the end, I just paid the taxes on it. Trying to get them to correct the form would have been a nightmare.</p>
<p>I’m in the process of downsizing also. We have a roomful of pictures etc from my father that we’re trying to go through. We don’t have a clue who some of the people are in the pictures. Those are going to be tossed along with pictures of places my parents traveled to that don’t include them in the pictures. Others I plan on either photographing them or scanning them onto dvd’s. Anybody know a quick way of doing this. </p>
<p>Right now I’m trying to check my statements from schwab and etrade for my taxes. I still don’t understand how schwab has the 1099 laid out. Etrade is a lot more understandable.</p>
<p>I’m putting my stuff onto electronic notebooks. Microsoft One Note (comes with Office) on Windows, Growly Notes on Mac. You just drag the pictures into a notebook section. You can put descriptions and annotations around the pictures too.</p>
<p>That link from BCE is about gov’t workers. If you are an employee of the Commonwealth then you are required to be in the pension plan, and they made mandatory deductions from your paycheck.</p>
<p>There’s nothing mandatory for private employees. Although I believe in some (all?) states you have to opt out of 401ks now. You are automatically enrolled unless you choose not to be.</p>
<p>It is for government workers but my son had a chunk of money taken out of his paycheck for MA OBRA so I assumed that it was because he hadn’t picked a retirement plan. I need to look at his paystub - BTW, he doesn’t work for the state.</p>
<p>" Something else that I’m doing is tossing books. Basically stuff that’s old, that I haven’t read in a long time, stuff related to the kids’ educations that they know so they don’t need books for, stuff that is in books that’s now free on the web"</p>
<p>You might already know this, but some of those books might be worth a lot of money selling them on the internet. You can sell them back to several agencies without hassle. I sold a couple hundred dollars of kids high school and college text books to Amazon, sent them all in one big package (you know what you’ll get for them before you send them), and they give $$ to you in a gift card. Some of those books are still worth big bucks, and you don’t have to spend the time to advertise them yourself if you don’t want to. Just get a huge stack of them together, google amazon book sellback, put in the ISBN code, and see what you’ll get.</p>
<p>I’m thinking of dumping my old textbooks that I don’t think of as having value - we’re talking about late 70s, early 80s stuff. Science fiction books from the last thirty years. English textbooks that are several decades old (a college was tossing out a bunch of textbooks from the 50s and 60s and we took them for our kids’ homeschooling program).</p>
<p>I’m sure that I could get a lot of money for my Apostol Calculus textbooks and others but I’m not getting rid of those.</p>
<p>The OBRA stuff is from his work at college. The statement period covered his full-time work though but I checked his paystub and they aren’t taking anything out. He’s losing money in their savings account though - about $6 or $7 / year. Our daughter contributed a few bucks and it was completely eaten up by fees.</p>
<p>I have foreign tax credit carryovers from 2010 and 2005 (I may just skip the 2005 ones) and I couldn’t figure out how to enter them in TurboTax (I used TaxAct in 2010). So I went looking on the web and didn’t find the answer. However, I found the TurboTax support page and they have three options. Online forums, chat support and phone support. I’m actually shocked! A consumer software company that provides support! I know how far I’d get if I needed Microsoft support.</p>
<p>I’ve used TaxAct’s support a few times, it seems pretty good.</p>
<p>There are lots of (non-Microsoft-owned) support forums dedicated to Microsoft, and I can’t remember the last problem I had that googling didn’t turn up an answer. I think you can pay for support, too.</p>
<p>You probably paid more for TurboTax than you paid for the Microsoft OS on your computer, so it isn’t surprising that MS charges for support.</p>
<p>However, prices from Newegg for Microsoft Windows 7 are:</p>
<p>Home Premium OEM $99.99
Home Premium Retail $199.99
Professional OEM $139.99
Professional Retail $299.99
Ultimate OEM $189.99
Ultimate Retail $319</p>
<p>I have a Windows XP Professional OEM license on my Boot Camp partition and a Windows XP Retail license for my Windows VM on the Mac OS X partition on my system. I think that I paid about $360 for these licenses (prices for Windows 7 are a little lower than they were for Windows XP).</p>
<p>So I’m absolutely sure that I didn’t pay more for TurboTax than what I paid for either Microsoft OS on my computer. BTW, the Boot Camp partition is somewhat of a waste as I seldom use it. It has my TurboTax files going back a few years which is why I keep it around but it is dog slow to boot it up. I have an SSD on my MacBook Pro to boot Mac OS X so Mac OS X is very fast but Windows runs off the hard disk. This machine is over five years old and I’ve thought about replacing the HDD with another SSD - 512 GB SSDs aren’t bad these days. The question is should I just get a new computer - for $2K?</p>
<p>I went to the Windows Boot Camp partition to check my TaxAct return. TurboTax gives you a breakout of normal Foreign Tax Credit carryovers broken down by regular taxes and AMT. TaxAct doesn’t seem to make the distinction. So I’m not sure how to enter it into TurboTax but I’m going to punt and enter it in the AMT section because that’s what TurboTax did for 2011 and 2012. In looking over TaxAct, I don’t think that it does a Foreign Tax Credit Carryover worksheet for you - at least in the 2010 version - I couldn’t find a form for it in the forms list. That can be serious money left on the table.</p>
<p>Sure if you walk into a store and buy it off the shelf the OS will be more. But when you buy a computer with a MS OS already installed, the cost is much much less. I have never had to buy a standalone version of Windows, I buy systems with the OS included.</p>
<p>Dell at times has sold computers with a free linux OS installed for less than the same machine with Window installed, essentially assigning Windows a negative value.</p>
<p>I e-filed last night. Auto-withdrawal is set for 4/12. That is going to be a painful day. :(</p>
<p>I showed Newegg prices too. Newegg is an online retailer.</p>
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<p>But you get less too.</p>
<p>I just went to Dell.com and looked up a random system. Windows 7 Home Premium is included. Windows 7 Pro is an additional $23.80 and Windows 7 Ultimate is an additional $57.80. But you don’t get a media disk. For an extra $2.04, you can get a recovery DVD from Dell but these are usually images; not Microsoft installation disks. So you get DVDs that will restore your system to factory settings but what if you’ve installed a lot of software on your system? You get to reinstall it all again (if you can find it). The Microsoft Windows installation disk allows you to do repair installs where it can repair damaged files or items without a full system re-installation. BTW, I bought two systems back in 2005 from HP where you had to make your own recovery disks. It took about three hours per system and I had to provide a number of blank media disks. Those were image recovery disks too - not Microsoft Windows disks.</p>
<p>The other thing about OEM Windows is that is that you have to keep paying Microsoft for every machine. The Windows Retail license can be legally moved from machine to machine so you only have to pay for it once instead of paying for licenses everytime you get a new system. I built my own desktop the last time around and I like the ability to choose which components go into my system instead of taking a lot of the cheap junk that goes into Dell and HP consumer-grade desktops these days. I also like the idea that I can reuse the case, power supply and many other components for the next 20 years. If I want to upgrade the processor or motherboard - I only have to replace those parts. I won’t have a big collection of cases, power supplies, fans, etc. to leave in the basement or try to sell.</p>
<p>We use Macs for laptops so the ability to move Windows licenses from machine to machine is very nice.</p>
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<p>Linux preinstallation and support isn’t free.</p>
<p>I’m ready to file. Amazing! This has been a relatively easy year.</p>
This is a great theory, but what I’ve found in practice is that by the time I want to upgrade, you can’t get cpus that fit the motherboard because the package has changed, and the graphics card connector may have changed. Hard drive interfaces change as well. At that point you might as well just get a new computer.</p>
<p>My current system is about 10 years old. I am on my 2nd motherboard, 2nd cpu, 3rd power supply, and 3rd graphics card. I got all the parts (except the power supplies) off of eBay because nobody made compatible parts any more.</p>
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Well, neither is Windows installation and support.</p>
<p>I originally went with TaxACT because it was much cheaper than TurboTax, and I have been happy with it. This year though, I wound up paying AMT because of ISOs (and other reasons), and in theory if I am under the AMT amount next year I can get some of it back. But I am not confident that TaxACT will handle it correctly, because the program didn’t collect specific info about the options. It also affects the basis when I sell the shares. So we will see next year.</p>
<p>You can just replace the motherboard too. I haven’t had the problem with graphics connectors and don’t expect to as I will probably just go with Intel integrated in the future. They already support three displays and performance continues to get better at a pretty fast clip. PCI Xn compatibility seems to be decent going up and down the versions.</p>
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<p>I’m a bit surprised that you’ve had to replace so many PSUs and graphics cards. I way over-configure on these as they inevitably degrade over time.</p>
<p>Yes, that’s the way it is setup in TurboTax right now. It might be worthwhile looking at taking this as a deduction in some year to be able to recoup foreign tax credit carryovers.</p>