On Money and Taxes

Ugh...taxes are due next week. Oh, I'm sure you all know that already. We are usually so ahead of the game; filing by March 1st is usually considered late for us! But not this year...this year we have 5 days to go and still haven't filed. Obviously we've been busy, but we really need to get it together. It's just taking us a long time because we have additional things to worry about.
As usual, filing for my little side business, which isn't anything much, but it's still additional paperwork.

Then, filing for adoption expenses. We never finalized (obviously) but we still put out some money towards it, so we can claim our 2011 expenses this year. That is going to be nice, since it's a credit. I asked for and got a letter from our agency detailing our expenses, just in case we are audited. It's almost $4K so I am very excited to get that back.

Finally, medical deductions. Ugh. So I've read lots of mixed things on claiming surrogacy expenses. Some people say yes, some people say no. Tax people. I'm not a tax person, but I am an attorney so I went looking for some case law on it. And from what I've found it seems like if you have "medical infertility" then you should be able to claim it. So we're going to try. Now, my ILs paid for a good portion of it (because we never would have been able to) but we probably paid about 1/3 of it ourselves. I went through all of our receipts and bank statements for the last year and added up our expenses. It makes me want to cringe. Almost $80K from beginning to end.

And honestly, that's pretty good for surrogacy. For that we have two children, and no unexpected expenses. One adoption would have cost us $32K so in reality it's not bad at all. But thank God for my inlaws without which we NEVER would have been able to do this. (even if I do complain about them a lot :)

But trying to sort out all this stuff has taken a lot of time. We even considered filing an amended return but I think we'll get it done on time.

Ugh, taxes. And money. I hate them both.