Taxes. Huphrumph.

Allow us, if you will, a moment to express a few of our recent tax grievances (not like 1773 Boston Tea Party grievances, just situational venting really).

No, this is not a political statement :-).

While getting married can positively impact one's tax return, we are discovering that filing jointly for the first time can also be a real pain, no matter the bottom line. Even the people assigned to help with taxes on the base grimace when they hear about our situation. Sigh. Here are just some of the situational things we're trying to accurately report:

• We got married
• John is a legal resident of Florida (no state income tax filing required)
• Jennifer is a legal resident of California (of course a state income tax filing is required)
• We both own property in California (and earn income on it, which is in California)
• Jennifer worked in California (but not John, technically he worked in Florida)
• John is active duty military, Jennifer is not
• John's condo was rented out for the full year (that was the easy part)
• Jennifer's condo was partially rented (while she occupied the other room) for 8 months of the year, not rented for 2 months out of the year (while she lived there alone) and fully rented out for 2 months of the year



Income what?

John lived where?

If that wasn't enough, getting help has not been the easiest process. First of all, see the grimace mentioned above. Secondly, we are 16 hours ahead of Pacific Time in the States, so you can imagine how difficult it is to catch the helper people on the phone. Fortunately technology these days allows for "live chat" which we thought would save us as we tackled some of our most challenging questions, however we were soon told by some of the H&R Block tax chat people that they don't answer tax questions. Huh? Seriously? No, they answer program questions like where to input your income. That being said, they are very nice and more than willing to connect us to a tax consultant, which brings us right back to the 16 hour time difference problem mentioned above.

Too bad we're not this cute.

Sigh. Again. Anyway, we are slowly but surely working through our questions but are looking forward to pressing the "file" button. If you are not already married, you can expect more joy than you ever imagined, but do prepare yourself to face a tongue-in-cheek form of "marital issues" around April 15!