Monday 14 August 2006

Tax time blues

Well, it's that time of the year again. I did my wife's tax return last weekend (using eTax) and she got her refund deposited into her account on Friday! I've now started the annual grind of doing my taxes. Once you've done your own return a few times, it's fairly straight forward, just need to check on any relevant changes and spend the time to add up all dividends, deductible expenses etc. Well worth a couple of hours effort to save the cost of a tax preparer.

As a wage slave my return is fairly simple, but having some direct share investments can be a headache when you sell them and have to report for the Capital Gains Tax item - especially if you've acquired them in odd lots via DRPs and maybe sold some of your holding previously. I used to enter all trades and dividends into Quicken, and it was great for being able to select which lots of a share to deem as being sold. However, I haven't had time to keep Quicken updated since I married in '99, so I've had to manually track through all trades for shares I've sold to calculate capital gains info the last few tax returns.

Hopefully now that I've started using Quicken 2006 I'll be able to add in all the info for my current holdings over the next few months.

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