Happy Tax Day, all. Hope you finished in time. I finished mine mostly yesterday, but had to mail some city forms today. As usual, I had some difficulties, but it wasn’t all that bad. I had no Schedule C income this year, as I’m no longer an independent contractor, which made for less forms and simplified things.
It took me a little bit to remember what to do for federal. I copied the spreadsheet that I’ve been working on for a few years now, but it didn’t tell me quite where some of the info was coming from, so I added some notes to hopefully help me next year. I also had to go through the instructions to make sure nothing relevant changed. It didn’t but I still had to take the time to make sure. I hear they’re working toward having their own more guiding system like TurboTax or the like, which would be nice if they can do it well. The free fillable forms aren’t too bad once I figure them out though. Submitted and got accepted without any kickbacks this year.
I had trouble getting going on the state taxes, with this new OH ID thing. I went through it like a dozen times, reentering data, entering an email and SMS code, only to get a message that they can’t create my ID. They list a number of possible reasons, but don’t specify the problem. Turns out, they didn’t like my email address. Strangely, it was the only email address that they had used to contact me in recent years. Anyway, once I figured that out, and then had to repeat the code thing again for some reason, I was in and moving. With Ohio’s form, it tries to guide, but doesn’t give a lot of info or make it easy to verify things, so I always feels a little unsure if I entered everything correctly. Submitted, and done.
City taxes always seem to be harder than they should be. They changed the form this year, seemingly to make it more prominently noticeable that people living and working in different cities have to split the percentage between them. But it made it more confusing for me and harder to just follow the same procedures from last year. They do their E-File through a third party. I kind of don’t like giving that kind of data to some random company, so I found the PDF forms hidden at the bottom of the tax page and filled them out. When I went to print them, perfectly white sheets of paper came out: No ink I guess. So I gave in and went through the E-File. It was a wizard rather than a form, so I just followed it. It, not transposing two digits like I did in my head, noticed that I overpaid some money rather than being dead on like I thought, so I assigned that money to next year. It said I had to submit my W2 and 1040 with the form, but when I hit the “Upload Documents” button, it said that Akron doesn’t accept uploads, and that I should mail them in. It didn’t even provide the address there or anything. Anyway, not having a working printer, I went to the library and printed what I needed and mailed it the next day. If I have to mail anyway, I could’ve just avoided this third party E-File service. Oh well, done.
I feel somewhat worn, and am glad to be done another year.