Feelings you have about taxes when you don’t know anything about doing taxes

It’s tax season, people. If you’ve already done your taxes, mazel! (Want to do ours next?) We hope it wasn’t too bad, and that you didn’t owe. If you haven’t yet, you have about two weeks to get on that before Uncle Sam comes a-knocking.

These days, programs like TurboTax and TaxAct make doing your taxes crazy easy. Even though it’s something we do every year — seriously, the process is always the same — every time we sit down to tackle our taxes, we think a lot of thoughts and feel a lot of feelings. Maybe you can relate.

The deadline is April 15, right?
Cool. Just figuring out how many more weekends we have to procrastinate and put off doing the inevitable. Because taxes are definitely a weekend activity.

Please, please let this be quick and painless.
Once we’ve gathered our documents and actually carved out the time to do our taxes, all that’s left to do is hope the financial gods are good to us. Fingers (and toes) crossed.

Should I have clicked “No” on that?
Some of these questions are worded super vaguely. Is that intentional? Is there possibly a glossary of terms or some helpful tool tips we could reference? And if we accidentally click the wrong thing, will the government hunt us down and demand to see our coffee receipts and take us for all we’re worth?

Wow. I spend a lot of money on rent.
Tallying up the total spent on both housing and transportation in the calendar year is just depressing.

Why did my state refund just go from $2k to $350?
All we did was click “Yes” and again, we’re not entirely sure if that was even the right answer.

Please don’t owe money. Please don’t owe money.
The refund doesn’t even have to be that much, just as long as it’s something. If the numbers in the top of the screen are green, we’re good.

Do you think I can write off ___?
We’ve heard friends say things like “I wrote off my Internet” and “I wrote off my computer,” claiming they’re business expenses. Is that really a thing? We know it depends on your job/industry, but that sounds like something we should probably do. So why don’t we take time to do a little research instead of just plowing through our taxes to get them over with?

What will I spend my tax refund on?
We know we should do the sensible thing and save it, but it’s sooo tempting to put it toward something fun like a new bag or new sneakers. It feels like free money! (Even though it really isn’t).

I should save more.
We’re careful with our savings (despite what we just said above). But even so, there’s something about doing our taxes that make us feel like we aren’t saving enough.

Should I be paying someone to do this for me?
Let’s face it: Online tax programs are insanely helpful, but we probably aren’t getting our maximum refunds back. We’re going to miss something that we could be expensing, and an accountant would be a huge help. But TurboTax is just so convenient.

Phew. Done for another year.
Though we know we’ll go through this all again in 2017.