Morton Fox (mortonfox) wrote,
Morton Fox
mortonfox

Cozying up to Pictures and Taxes

Did a bit more work on my tax return last night. I don't get my tax information all at once. Instead, the 1099-DIV/INT/B forms (and corrections to those forms) trickle in throughout January and February. So I input them into Taxcut as they come in. That way, I should be ready to file in early March.

The most annoying items so far are the "Return of Capital" distributions. Although the explanation I linked to talks about mutual funds, in my experience, it's usually REITs that do that. Since I sold a bunch of REITs last year in anticipation (possibly premature) of a real estate downturn, this time around I have to account for these distributions. According to the rules, I need to lower the cost basis by the amounts of RoC distributions that I received over the years. If I'd kept a list of those distributions somewhere, it would be easy. Naturally, I didn't. But I still do have Taxcut data files from previous years, so it was a matter of running old Taxcut software one year at a time to retrieve the info. As I said, annoying.

It turns out that I don't have to worry about foreign dividends adding to the tax bill. That's because I already paid the tax on those. What happened is when the dividend was paid out, the country of origin withheld a tax of around 15% (varies by country). Then when I do the tax return, I get a tax credit for the foreign tax and then get taxed 15% here. So it's more or less a wash. Anyway, the tax refund meter is now at -$942.

After work comes play. So for the rest of the night, I put the weekend's photos up on geocaching.com, geosnapper, wunderground, Flickr, and techiwarehouse. Among those, there's this picture of a... okay, maybe I don't like that one. :)
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