I would like to talk today about taxes. Why? It is simple, I have something to tell about taxes. I could not say that is my favorite theme, not at all. There are so many marvelous subjects to discuss! I just want to share my tax filing experience. Is it something extraordinary? Yes, it is in my case, because it produced a side effect, originally unexpected. Just keep reading.
There is nothing easier than filing your return, if you have a regular job. Your taxes are subtracted from your wages automatically. You need two hours, the max, for filing. I could see that many times, when our sons were filling their tax forms.. But it was always extremely boring process for me, a real headache, not using more strong expression. Why? Because, that was home business I had to file. We, with my wife, run a small artistic home business. If you have similar business of your own, you understand. If not, believe me, it is hard.
Our business is really small. Therefore all bookkeeping, banking, making records, gathering receipts, sorting them and all calculations to get ready figures to fill lines in the tax forms, all this work is my responsibility. We cannot afford a bookkeeper to do all this stuff. I do not use accountants many years, because I never could understand why people pay them big bucks. They just put ready, pre-calculated figures in proper lines. Tax programs, e.g. TurboTax, do the same. This is the easiest, by time and efforts, part of the entire process. I do it myself.
The last step of filing process is looking in the Tax Table to get your tax, when you got ready a figure for your taxable income. This is the point, where I can share something. I have found helpful to write a program returning tax for a given figure of taxable income. I write such a program every year. First I used MS Excel for that, and then I wrote this function in C # to make it available and easy to use for other people. That was not that easy as one might think. I needed to decipher the IRS Tax Table, to reveal how it is built and put it in programmable formulae.
Having the work described above done for four categories of taxpayers and corporation as well for comparison, I could not withstand temptation to draw graphics for wide range of taxable income. So I did and I was rewarded seeing the graphics, because that occurred to be something worthy to see. I made some observations and put all the stuff in an e-book.
The program and e-book are available for public now:
Taxes 2007 in Graphics And Tax Program
After all, that made the filing less boring and more creative process. Therefore I made my taxes for 2007 in time and I am happy now.
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