Taxes are upon us. Again.
I guess we all have reason to be thankful when we have the income to be taxed, but I doubt many of us would put filing tax returns high on our lists of great ways to spend time.
I'm not an early filer, but at least I'm an on-time filer now. I used to kick the can so far down the road that I'd run up against the extended filing deadline. Progress is progress!
(At least we get an extra weekend to file this year! )
As we get into tax season 2022, most of our taxes are similar to last year's. Here are a few things of interest about this year's for us.
Here we go ….
Continuing with HRBlock.com
We've used HRBlock.com for years and will be continuing with it for this year. We've gotten used to the rhythm of how to enter things and it goes pretty quickly.
There's the occasional “weird thing” about my holdings that makes it necessary for a tax pro to review the taxes, and this year I've already hit the tripwire on that one (a foreign company with weird reporting on the K-1.)
Overall it does make things easier and I can file the federal and state electronically, which time-stamps my filing date. I haven't found a cheap alternative for our pass-through returns, so the past two years I've filed by mail and kept proof of mailing so that I could get the penalties removed.
(Hopefully, it will be unnecessary to handle it this year; my penalties came about because the IRS got really backed up during the pandemic. I haven't gotten the letters from them yet; hopefully, I won't.)
If you work with the IRS, I've found that they'll work with you. They waived over $1,500 in penalties due to me missing the change in the due date of Form 1065 since I had been good prior and called them promptly when I got the letter.
Filing my daughter's taxes
My daughter gets to file taxes this year, thanks to her summer swim coaching job.
I found out today that the simplified form I remember, the 1040EZ, is no longer a thing. Tax Year 2017 was the last year that it was in force.
So, I get to use the full 1040 on her. Since she had a single job and a single interest-bearing checking account, I'll probably do this one by hand. (Actually, she will do this one by hand and I'll help her 🙂 )
Continuing to track my crypto transactions
The IRS continues to ask about your cryptocurrency activity (under penalty of perjury, of course.)
Most of my cryptocurrency activity for 2021 involves acquiring it rather than selling it, though I did have a few transfers that were taxable events. The primary one was purchasing some Energi that I used for staking.
I use Kubera for tracking my portfolio value (including cryptocurrency and more). It pulls the value directly in from Coinbase, which is nice.
In for a big solar credit
At the end of last year, we purchased a solar energy system from Ion Solar. (If you're interested in learning more about our system, let me know in the contact form and I'll be glad to share!)
Renewable energy in general comes with some nice tax incentives. For ours, we are eligible for a 26% federal tax credit. This is good for systems installed through 2022, and a 22% credit applies to systems installed in 2023.
Very thankful that the government is helping us pay to run our meter backward!
