Today I did my taxes for the first time… yes, it was as scary as it sounds. It’s one of the most uttered lines of our generation, “What did I really learn in school, they never even taught me how to do my taxes." Spoiler alert, it’s true. Four years of college prep taught me how to adequately calculate derivatives, complete a lab report, and pass an AP exam but ask me what a W-2 was before yesterday and I would have never been able to tell you. Turns out it's just a form that your employer is supposed to send you that lists how much money you made and the amount of federal, state, and other taxes withheld from your paycheck.
So there I sat with this flimsy piece of paper, filled with numbers that vaguely made sense and I had no clue what to do. Years of my elders complaining at the horror that was taxes did not really give me any tips on where to start. Staring at this stupid form made me feel like I needed a How to File Your Taxes for Dummies book. All those years of practicing for ACTS, the school system couldn’t have fit in a mock tax form day?
Thankfully, I had my dad on hand to show me the ways of the beast, also known as TurboTax. I would spend minutes reading through each page that he automatically knew just to click past. So many boxes, options for deductions or reasons I might owe money, they made my head spin. I went to a good high school, I go to a pretty good college and this process still gave me a headache. And the U.S. government wonders why people don’t pay their taxes. My English major mind was not prepared to think through all those numbers, God bless anyone who wants to be an accountant.
After the initial shock, fear of inputting data, the process was not too difficult. Thankfully or not thankfully I do not have a large portfolio of investments to worry about just yet. Yay, more fun stuff to worry about in the future. Then TurboTax walks you through this whole maze of fun things you might be able to get deductions for, five minutes later and I’d gotten a whole whopping $0 back. But that’s just the federal return, now you get to start on the state one, to which I learned I’m legally still an Illinois resident so they got to take a good chunk of my money too.
But then magically just like that, 25 minutes later, I was done. I clicked print, almost forgot to sign the bottom, stapled on my W-2, and put a stamp on the envelope. Okay so maybe it’s not all that scary as it seems, at least not yet. We’ve got a few more years of bliss before we have dependents of our own, house mortgages, and stock portfolios to manage. Hopefully, by then I’ll have married an accountant or the government will finally figure out a way to simplify this process. Till then, good luck to the rest of you. April 18 is looming close, rip it off like a band-aid, it’s not going to get any easier.
