Well, it’s time once again to start working on taxes. And once again I find myself using H&R Block’s Taxcut Product. This year, they’ve gone the consumer-friendly route of including the state product with their Taxcut Deluxe package, so you don’t have to purchase it and request a rebate. Good move on their part.
Once again, the most fun part of tax time is figuring out capital gains on all of our various stock and mutual fund sales. Or more specifically, figuring out the cost basis. And it’s even more fun, when there are splits and spinoffs involved with the stock you’re selling.
Earlier in 2005 I put together a spreadsheet for each stock and mutual fund holding we own, that identifies each specific lot along with purchase date, amount invested, etc. That allows me to compute accurate cost basis info using either the FIFO method, or by specific identification of lots. It seems to work pretty well, and takes a lot of the tedium out of the process. However, it doesn’t handle the case of multiple purchases on the same day. It shouldn’t be hard to modify the sheet to handle this, but so far I haven’t needed to.
At any rate, it looks like we’re due for nominal refunds from both state and fed, which is exactly what I shot for when I last filled out a W-4. Time to have another kid, so I can do that all over again!