Tax Time

It's January 31st, and you know what that means!  Today was the official deadline to have all W-2's, and other tax documents postmarked and mailed out.  We've gotten all of our paperwork in from employers and such, and I have been busy compiling a list of our deductions (or hopefully so) for last year.  Normally I file our taxes myself.  This year, we've decided that for peace of mind, we're hiring a tax pro to do our taxes.  A friend of my husband's recommended his tax guy who is based in Texas, but who has extensive experience with couples and individuals in our circumstance (hubby works overseas).  I have to admit, I'm very apprehensive about what the end result is going to be.  I'm terrified that we're going to owe tens of thousands of dollars to the IRS this year.  We've had to pay every year except one, and the year we actually got a refund, it ended up going to pay off the taxes that we owed from the prior year.   Since we don't own a house, that hurts us a bit too.

I'm looking for some sort of software that will allow me to input my expenses for the year, as I incur them so that I'm not sitting here again next year at this time inputting all the items that I can manage to find when scouring through our bank statements.  I typically will just drop my receipts as I get them into a file folder, and then when it's tax time, I will enter them all into an Excel spreadsheet and categorize the expenses and which taxpayer (me or hubby) incurred them, the date, the amount, etc.  The poor tax man...at least they're somewhat organized!  If anybody out there reading this has any suggestions on a better way to do this, please comment!!