Thursday, October 05, 2006

Tax class update

I must say, itemized deductions are really boring. I got 3 points off on my quiz because I mistakenly lumped moving expenses in with job expenses (moving expenses are on the front of the 1040 and are taken off your income to arrive at your AGI, while job hunting expenses are on your Schedule A and must meet the miscellaneous items 2% of income test.) I feel like I am getting everything, but usually right after the appropriate time to show that I know it - ie I have to get it wrong before I actually learn it. So that's tiresome. Although I am pretty sure that I am a lot more comfortable with the material than a lot of the others in the class. There's a CPA who can't get any jobs because she doesn't have tax experience, which makes me wonder what they DID teach her, wherever she went to school. But apparently you can take this class and it counts for some tax class at the city college in their CPA class, so I guess it's just as comprehensive.

I often make silly mistakes like mixing up the amounts for exemptions and deductions (part of the reason I got that question wrong) and that's why I've started to do my problems in pencil instead of pen. I also get annoyed when I make a mistake that I know I wouldn't have made if I were using a computer instead of a paper form. I know I'll never have to do a paper 1040 again, most likely, so that buoys my hope.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I know that in my tax classes, we blew past the individual stuff in no time flat and never went in-depth on any of it. I only know those things because I've done tax prep for people before, off the record of course. In class, what we cover is all partnerships and corporations and seriously complicated stuff that has nothing to do with filling out forms and all of us will promptly forget and have to look up in the code and regs again later.

Accounting classes are often short on practical, useful-in-employment sorts of information.