Death and taxes

For most of my adult life, I have prepared my own (and my husband’s and my joint) tax returns. There were a few years where I also did the taxes for one of my aunt’s, my father-in-law, and our two sons. I would sit down at the dining room table with all the bits and pieces of the past year’s transactions, the extra IRS forms for whatever extra was going on in a particular year, several sheets of notebook paper, a couple of pencils, and a calculator. I have never used Turbo Tax or any of those packages – I just wrote down everything on the notebook paper and transfered information onto the tax forms. A few years ago, we made some small (which are now much smaller) investments. When I saw some of the blocks of information on the tax documents from the investments, I finally gave up the battle and went to H&R Block. (This is not an endorsement of one particular tax preparer over another one.) I am chagrined that taxes are now too complicated for me to be comfortable to prepare my own returns anymore. I can only hope that sometime in the future, the tax code will be simplified so that most of us can still do our own taxes.