Anonymous My Ass!

So a couple weeks ago, I got an email from my friend Holly telling me thanks for supporting her on hiking for a charitable cause. I wrote her back, asking what she was talking about. It turned out that apparently, many, many months ago, I had donated money for her cause. And I simply forgot about it.

Well, that little email exchange opened my eyes a little. I have always donated my money to causes I deem worthy, especially when my friends are fundraising while doing something good for themselves like a run, hike, bike, et cetera. And I have always donated my money anonymously.

Well, unbeknownst to me, when you donate money anonymously, you are really just keeping yourself anonymous from other potential donors, not a hundred percent anonymous as in the recipient not knowing who I was. That made me feel a little bit disappointed, because I never want people to know who gave how much to whom, you know?

I guess I'm just a little bit disappointed that anonymous donations aren't really anonymous. Oh well... In the end, I'm still supporting a good cause by proxy. Through several contributions I have made over the years, I don't feel so guilty for not running major races like the Chicago Marathon for charity. And I plan on continuing to support worthy causes my friends choose to partake in.

Death by the Numbers...

Man, I was one unhappy person since the weekend. I made sure I flew home this past weekend specifically so I could spend the entire Saturday filing my taxes. After spending an entire day, the end was nowhere in sight, and it was already 20:30. I have friends whom I have not seen or socialized with for a long time gathering at a pub at that time. Screw it! I need a beer! So off I went.

The night turned out to be good. I caught up with a lot of friends, and I drank lots of beer. Mmm... Beer. And we took pictures. In a photo booth. How many bars have you been to that can stake some prime bar real estate claim in a photo booth? Right, I thought so. Of course, a few of us just had to spend our precious George Washington's on it.

Anyway, it was real unfortunate that I had to leave some behind and head home at 01:30 in the morning, for I had a 11:50 flight that Sunday morning. That sucked real bad, considering I got home on Friday night around 22:00. So total time I spent in Chicago over the weekend? A few minutes shy of one and a half days. Woo hoo!

When I got to Los Angeles on Sunday, I spent the rest of the evening on taxes. And then part of the day on Monday on it too, at work no less. {Hee hee, I'm a rebel!} Filing taxes this year was extremely frustrating due to many reasons. Here are some of the things I've learned this year:

• Multiple states suck! Because I B M have physical offices at pretty much all the continental states, not only did I get double-taxed on part of my income, I also had to file a gazillion state taxes.
  
• Stock options are a bitch! Because I left my previous employer in the middle of 2006, I had to exercise my stock options. Which meant having to understand the intricate tax consequences from something as simple as stock options. Which also had the extra benefit of putting me in a much higher tax bracket. Effers!
  
• Free Stocks? Yeah right!!! Apparently, stock options are not gratuitous stocks as most human resource officers led you to believe during orientation. In fact, when you exercise stock options, it is a cashless sale. What? Yeah, I asked that question too. Basically, it is stock the company promised to sell you in the future at the price during the time the stock option was granted, which you can sell at the current price right after buying them. In other words, you don't keep the entire worth of the stock. You only get the profit (or loss) on them. Damn! Maybe if I had paid attention to my finance class in college I would have realized that, but oops!
  
• Who the hell understands Form 1040 Schedule D (Capital Gains and Loses)?!? If the price of the stock is higher than the grant price, I obviously made a profit. Yet, if you follow the instructions like I have, which I did five times, box f (Gain or Loss) turns out to be a negative number! Isn't that freaking counterintuitive? It threw me off repeatedly!
  
• TurboTax.com sucks! Because I have multiple W-2c forms (corrected W-2 due to a mistake in not reporting taxes on multiple states during the year), I had to enter them individually, which is not a problem. The website even allows you to mark it if it is a W-2c. Yet, after you spent hours upon ungodly hours on the website, it complained that you cannot have a blank or 0 in box 1, which is my wages. Hello!!! If it is a corrected W-2 form, it will have something if my wage was different. But that wasn't the change! In other words, the checkbox marking a W-2 as a W-2c is useless.
  
• TurboTax.com sucks even more! When you start filing your taxes on TurboTax.com, the first thing it asks of you is to input all your W-2's. After spending an eternity on the site, it even asks you if you want to pay $34.95 extra to prepare your state taxes automatically. If you had said yes, it'll let you begin working on each state tax one by one. After spending a crazy amount of time on the first three state taxes, the website threw a conniption fit because it can only help you process no more than three state taxes! What?!? It's not like the website didn't know I have more than three states to report in the first freaking place!!! So I had to do just three states, and then do the rest manually! Can I shoot someone please? Or at the very least, kicked the TurboTax.com CEO's nuts real hard?
  
• TurboTax.com sucks more than a two dollar corner hooker who specializes in blowjobs! Because of the previously mentioned lack of utilizing the W-2c flag, the freaking website was unable to e-file for me. Fine! So it was 85% waste of my time. But since I had invested so much of my time on this website which I have reliably loved and used for many years since my college days, I decided to just pay and have my forms printed out. But if the website has already told me I cannot e-file my tax returns, then why the hell would it offer me to e-file at the end of printing them out? And when you take it up on its offer, it failed again. Would you be pleased if you go to a bar that had a sign that read: "Free beer with purchase of wings," only to be told by the barkeep that you can't get free beer because you had to order 100 wings. Then later, when you order just 25 wings because you got hungry, you were told, “You can get free beer!” So you accept, only to get rejected all over again. What gives?!? Don't ask me again if you already know you can't do it for me! Muthaeffers!

So after the deadly ordeal I had gone through which lasted three days, I was pleased that my taxes were all done, not to mention extremely relieved. So here are my taxes by the numbers:

• This year I got $1,048 less in refunds than last year. Damn Uncle Sam! If it wasn't for owning a home and its benefit of claiming mortgage interest credit, I would have owed this year.
• My effective tax rate jumped from 11.90% to 15.86%. I would have been okay with that if healthcare and education aren't in the dumps. Instead, I'm funding Dubya's unjust quagmire that is Iraq.
• I had income in six states. Thankfully, two states don't collect income tax. Florida and some other which I forgot. Still, filing a shitload of tax returns suck nonetheless.
• Instead of taking the standard $30 federal excise tax credit, I actually went through all my cellular and land line phone bills from March 2003 through July 2006 and added up all my federal excise taxes paid. I got $102 back, including taxes! Hell yeah!!! (Now I just need to justify the costs of saving and storing all my bills and records from all the way back in 1999.)
• Total weight of all my five tax returns, before stamps were licked and glued on: 10.7 ounces. That's over half a freaking pound!!!
• Total cost of stamps: $4 and some change!
  
• Number of trees killed while printing out my tax returns: 500.