Drum rolls please!

Got my taxes done last weekend!!

BA-DA-BING!! BA-DA-BOOM!! Clap!! Clap!!

Thank you! Thank you!! Thank you very much!!!

There have been times when I have left it to the eleventh hour. Once, I even had to file for an extension. And that when I was having it done professionally (actually I’ve been doing it that way for about 5 years now). If you are a procrastinator (like me) you know what I’m talking about.

Not this time pal! Especially since I was expecting a refund. So this Monday (what better way to spend the President’s day holiday, eh?) I collected all my tax papers and logged on to TurboTax.com. Three hours later I was looking at a cool $7000 refund. The cost: $35. This sounded too good to be true. I thought I probably made a mistake. I double-checked it. Same result! I still didn’t want to take any chances so I headed off to HR Block. And boy, do they suck or what? They made me wait for an hour and a half! And that, after I had taken an appointment by phone beforehand. The history was repeating itself. While sitting there and twiddling my thumbs, I decided to take my business elsewhere starting next year. If you ever go to HR Block, fix an appointment and make sure you know who you’re meeting. An appointment without the name of the preparer is a walk-in for them. After the wait was over, an old lady took me to her office and did pretty much the same thing that I had done at my home computer (i.e. feed the data to the software) and gave me the same result. The cost: $250. Um…I don’t think so!

I checked the status of my filing this morning at TurboTax and guess what? Federal return has been already been accepted and VA state return is in progress. The money should be in the bank in 10 days.