Westminster Confessions

It has come to my attention (thanks DH) that I have neglected this blog for an entire week. In my defense I would like to say that it is less than 10 days until the April 15th tax deadline. While others have had the opportunity to wax on poetically or theologically, I have been wearing down pencils (and wearing out calculator batteries). I usually actually enjoy doing our own taxes. However, this year, because of the death of my Aunt, I get to do 7 (count them, SEVEN) tax returns. It could have been worse… since we didn’t have any income for the part of 2004 when we were living in PA I only have to file Federal and VA income tax returns (I got off the hook for a part-year PA return) for us. But, the real time consumers are all the forms for my Aunt: the Fed 1041, NJ 1041, IT-R (which might as well be the “Forget-the-Form-and-just-hand-it-all-over-to-NJ” estate tax form), a final Fed 1040 and a final NJ 1040. I actually have learned quite a bit (e.g. I did not know that partially forgiven debt is taxable… which makes no sense to me! If I didn’t have the money to pay my aunt’s creditors in full how does the government think I will have money to pay the tax on the amount I didn’t pay??) Kudos to J. Going for tracking down some info for me. And I finally did break down and get some official counsel from an estate tax attorney (a “Jersey Lawyer”). Every time I see those lawyer rates I wonder why I didn’t go to Harvard.

So, please give me some grace! April 15th will be here soon enough and I will re-emerge from under all the red tape.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 5th, 2005 at 10:13 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.