Taxes

I finally finished my federal income taxes for 2009. 

I've used TurboTax (or equivalent) for about 10 years.  And as I look at the insane number of calculations and forms required to compute my taxes it's easy to remember why.  However TurboTax has a horrible bug this year that wasted a ton of my time.  It likely effects a small % of their users, but if it hits you, it grinds your computer to a halt.  Basically if you have a large number of imported stock transactions AND you need to correct an error in these transactions which is common, the program uses a ton of memory and is very slow loading the imported transactions. Since I have a number of "managed accounts", I hit the limit quite easily.  Fixing up the data that should have taken me an hour or two probably took 15-20 hours.  All that time wasn't active -- much was click a button wait 5 minutes and do something else -- but it was too much.  If I had known how long it would take, I might have taken a different route, like buying their competing software.  Or paying someone to do our taxes.  I'll have to see if they have this bug next year.

But they're done and I'm going to try to get a jump on 2010 taxes by doing a better job of tracking our donations.