Blog or Die

I've come to a point where I must blog more often or there is really no point in keeping this thing active. So given those two choices, I choose to blog!

That being said, here are some things on my mind.

First of all, to borrow an Army expression: IF YOU ARE NOT CALLING OR EMAILING YOUR CONGRESSPERSON, YOU ARE WRONG!

"But I don't know how," you say.

Well make excuses no more! Click this link and you can choose from your Senators or House Representatives and they have direct links to their email forms.

Now I am one of the most politically irresponsible/lazy person in the country and even I took the time(painfully so) to write my Representative and each member of the Senate from the State of Kentucky.

So call/write them and tell them your feelings about the stimulus bill or I fear we could all be paying for it for a long time to come and see nearly no results. Or even worse we will see results in areas we never ever would otherwise support.


Now to other things.

It's tax season and I have one thing to say. STAY AWAY FROM H&R BLOCK!!!!!

They will RIP you off!

OK so here's the story. I needed to prepare a multi-state tax return and had some W-2 reissue issues b/c of damaged W-2's, mailing addresses I never changed and other things that aren't really important for this discussion.

I've always done my taxes online with no worries. However, I had never dealt with multi-state or other issues so I thought I'd be better off having H&R help me out so I wouldn't mess things up. So I go in. The good news is that when most of your taxable income came as a delivery driver, your total taxable income is VERY low. So my refund was fairly decent. This made me happy. Then the other shoe dropped. The tax lady(who turned out to seem very incompetent,) Mary Gleson, said it's going to take 5-8 weeks to mail it in and it's going to be a fee of $164.00.

That made me a very sad panda.

So I tell her in not so many words, she can relocate her domicile of residence to a place which is world renowned for being fatally hot in temperature and having very unhappy landlords.

OK so I didn't do that. But I did explain to her that is was pretty outrageous.

So I went back to my old standard. TaxAct

Now my thoughts on the outrageousness of it all were completely confirmed when I discovered I could get my taxes done for nearly free online and get the EXACT SAME refund.

I will never ever ever ever use H&R Block again for as long as I live.

I will go on to say that I recommend TaxAct if you're a person like me--relatively low income and fairly simple taxes. And this year e-filing anywhere is free if you're not rich.

OK that's about all for now. I'll blog again soon I promise.