It’s tax season and I’m one of those weird people that gets excited for it. I also happen to be one of those stupid people that uses the federal government as a savings account. Hence the excitement when tax season rolls around. I get pretty amounts of money back and it puts a big smile on my face.
It used to be that life was simple and my taxes were done in a heart beat by filling out the 1040ez. Then I graduated from college and started paying back student loans and I also graduated in my tax form to the plain ole 1040 (which has far more on it than I need).
This year I thought that I’d look at graduating to a higher level, itemizing my deductions. I figured that with the change from uber sweet medical insurance to uber horrible medical insurance I’d easily be able to throw my medical expenses into my deductions. It wasn’t easy. I couldn’t come close to even making it easy because I didn’t meet the “medical expenses being 7.5% of my Adjusted Gross Income (AGI)” rule. And then, to make matters worse, it was pointed out that we can only deduct the expenses that were over 7.5% of our AGI.
This is where I take a moment to vent.
I shouldn’t be paying several grand a year to sustain my life medically; and that’s several grand a year after they take a couple grand out of my paycheck as my insurance premium.
If I’m going to have to pay several grand a year to sustain my life medically, the deduction shouldn’t be based on my income. I understand that this was designed to keep people (upper class citizens) from using deductions to decrease the amount of income tax owed, but seriously, it’s injuring some of us (like us middle class citizens). At a minimum, if the deduction is going to be based on income there should be an exception for people with chronic diseases; because, just in case you weren’t aware, rich people are not the only people that have chronic diseases…People with chronic diseases like…oh, I don’t know, diabetes…should be able to deduct all their medical costs…
I’m done venting now.
On a good note:
I did my taxes via the TurboTax website as I’ve been doing the past 6 years. Yesterday morning I went to log in and I got a message about how I couldn’t log in because of a disconnect in the servers. I tweeted it and the TurboTax twitter people sent me a message and told me to DM them the details. I was impressed, that is awesome customer service. They saw a problem and they responded and they were nice. I was already a loyal customer of TurboTax before they tweeted me, but that definitely put a smile on my face and made me happy to know that if I ever had a problem with their product that I would be helped.
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