Today, I sent what I *think* is most if not all of the information needed to file our 2016 taxes to our accountant in CA. Our long post-move nightmare (after the long MOVING nightmare) may be coming to an end.
I refuse to take full or even much responsibility for what has been a horror for the last 2+ months - Charles was supposed to be responsible for the paperwork in the house. He insisted on it. Over the last 18 years I have repeatedly asked him if he was keeping track of the investments in materials and services that we paid for, for remodeling the house. He kept insisting yes, but - it wasn't really true. There were multiple boxes, envelopes, files - and they were scattered EVERYDAMNWHERE in our house and garage and storage area and then RV. Add the last minute moving out after the repair work he had to do (two months after I moved out into the RV 40 miles away with the cats), multiple rearrangements of the storage area after we moved out, and then movers mixing things up even more, and basically Charles has been holed up in the second bedroom much of every day for the last 6 weeks (after unpacking the main functionally necessary things in the house) trying to find the papers we need to file our taxes, including receipts for the investments we made in materials and services for the remodeling work over the years, so we can avoid paying taxes on the "profit" from the house (which was MUCH less after we paid off most of our non-house-specific debts, including credit cards, student loans and back taxes).
Sidebar - in addition to these papers, Charles had to find the titles to all three of our remaining vehicles (two cars and the RV), which were NOT in the same place. And we had to get them smogged, and fill out another mess of forms to get them titled and registered, and another set of forms to get US Arizona driver's licenses, which then involved finding MORE documents that were not where they should have been (birth certificates - had to be with the seal! - or passport (Charles' was lost when he tried to renew it 2 years ago and he STILL hasn't reapplied) in addition to our old licenses and proof of insurance, which we fortunately had done three months ago. Getting all that done took most of last Friday at the DMV, once I found out where it was (not as simple as you'd think, as apparently, it's MVD of the AZDOT, and not DMV and there are misleadingly named commercial enterprises here which charge you to do what you can do for "free" at the state office). But we are now O-ficial AZ residents, license plates and all.
Did you know that your down payment is NOT part of your investment in your house and can't be added to the basis? I know it's true, but damn, I still don't really understand why. Basically, we needed to find well over tens of thousands of $$ of receipts (which when he finally started to organize the collected receipts, he stopped when he hit twice the amount we needed, and there were a lot more, but I don't want to know how much) to increase our basis in the house, and zero out our tax liability.
But the one set of papers that eluded him for weeks - and still eludes him - is the closing papers on the house when we bought it in 2000. Last week, I finally had E-NUF of the upset and anger and tension of him going through box after box and not finding the folder with the closing papers (and blaming ME for "putting it somewhere"), and started making phone calls to try to get a copy, because it was clear he was NOT going to find this important file in time to file our taxes (or avoid a homicide).
He had found papers identifying the title company from that transaction - nope, they destroy records after 5 years. We only had the initial mortgage for a year before we refi'ed - but he discovered receipts showing that the original lender was Washington Mutual (WaMu) - which went out of business after the banking scandals of 2008-9. I researched and discovered their successor-in-interest was none other than our current bank JPMorgan Chase - and YAY! I called our bank manager and all they needed was the address of the house, the loan number and my SSN to track it down - though it will take a few weeks to get a copy. But, since we have enough receipts from the remodel to zero out the taxes without the exact amount of the closing costs of BUYING the house, it turns out the for the purpose of filing our taxes, all I really need is the price we paid, which I remember (though we need to be able to show the closing papers if we get audited, so I still ordered the copy).
So, for the last few days, Charles has been going through and organizing the zillions of receipts and writing them down by hand, including dates, vendor purpose and price. I told him the minimum total we needed in order to stop, and he went considerably over for a cushion, but stopped before finishing the whole pile.
Today, I entered the information into an Excel spreadsheet and added up the costs (fortunately, adding a long column of numbers is the sole Excel "function" I know how to do). I created a second spreadsheet for our donations to the Salvation Army (that we could find). And then I went online to our old bank and downloaded the mortgage and savings account interest 1099s (because somehow he didn't find the paper versions of THOSE either), the year end summaries of our now-nearly drained savings investments (yay! they did so badly before we drained them to make it through last year that we have hardly ANY profit to pay taxes on!), my HSA tax forms, and my W2, scanned in the closing papers from the sale of the house (at least we had that!), and emailed the whole mess to our accountant. (And then sent her another email an hour later, when Charles found the ACTUAL final closing papers, rather than the estimate, as well as another tax form for the full sales price ... grrr ... I hope that is all of it.)
And all of this was going on while we did the zillions of other things you have to do when you move to a new state and are old - like finding and going to new doctors and dentists, for example.
We may get back to a normal life at some point - once Charles REFILES all the crap in the second bedroom and den, which look like a bomb went off in them. But there is a place for the papers - while he was going through the papers, i bought nice used lateral file cabinets for them to go into, and found additional shelf hangers for them (some were missing). I even found someone who needs all the cardboard boxes that have been emptied in the process, so he doesn't have to do anything to clean up that part of the mess.
I've done my part - now I want a "normal" life back. Maybe start acting like the old people in this retirement community who all seem to be having a LOT of fun.
I refuse to take full or even much responsibility for what has been a horror for the last 2+ months - Charles was supposed to be responsible for the paperwork in the house. He insisted on it. Over the last 18 years I have repeatedly asked him if he was keeping track of the investments in materials and services that we paid for, for remodeling the house. He kept insisting yes, but - it wasn't really true. There were multiple boxes, envelopes, files - and they were scattered EVERYDAMNWHERE in our house and garage and storage area and then RV. Add the last minute moving out after the repair work he had to do (two months after I moved out into the RV 40 miles away with the cats), multiple rearrangements of the storage area after we moved out, and then movers mixing things up even more, and basically Charles has been holed up in the second bedroom much of every day for the last 6 weeks (after unpacking the main functionally necessary things in the house) trying to find the papers we need to file our taxes, including receipts for the investments we made in materials and services for the remodeling work over the years, so we can avoid paying taxes on the "profit" from the house (which was MUCH less after we paid off most of our non-house-specific debts, including credit cards, student loans and back taxes).
Sidebar - in addition to these papers, Charles had to find the titles to all three of our remaining vehicles (two cars and the RV), which were NOT in the same place. And we had to get them smogged, and fill out another mess of forms to get them titled and registered, and another set of forms to get US Arizona driver's licenses, which then involved finding MORE documents that were not where they should have been (birth certificates - had to be with the seal! - or passport (Charles' was lost when he tried to renew it 2 years ago and he STILL hasn't reapplied) in addition to our old licenses and proof of insurance, which we fortunately had done three months ago. Getting all that done took most of last Friday at the DMV, once I found out where it was (not as simple as you'd think, as apparently, it's MVD of the AZDOT, and not DMV and there are misleadingly named commercial enterprises here which charge you to do what you can do for "free" at the state office). But we are now O-ficial AZ residents, license plates and all.
Did you know that your down payment is NOT part of your investment in your house and can't be added to the basis? I know it's true, but damn, I still don't really understand why. Basically, we needed to find well over tens of thousands of $$ of receipts (which when he finally started to organize the collected receipts, he stopped when he hit twice the amount we needed, and there were a lot more, but I don't want to know how much) to increase our basis in the house, and zero out our tax liability.
But the one set of papers that eluded him for weeks - and still eludes him - is the closing papers on the house when we bought it in 2000. Last week, I finally had E-NUF of the upset and anger and tension of him going through box after box and not finding the folder with the closing papers (and blaming ME for "putting it somewhere"), and started making phone calls to try to get a copy, because it was clear he was NOT going to find this important file in time to file our taxes (or avoid a homicide).
He had found papers identifying the title company from that transaction - nope, they destroy records after 5 years. We only had the initial mortgage for a year before we refi'ed - but he discovered receipts showing that the original lender was Washington Mutual (WaMu) - which went out of business after the banking scandals of 2008-9. I researched and discovered their successor-in-interest was none other than our current bank JPMorgan Chase - and YAY! I called our bank manager and all they needed was the address of the house, the loan number and my SSN to track it down - though it will take a few weeks to get a copy. But, since we have enough receipts from the remodel to zero out the taxes without the exact amount of the closing costs of BUYING the house, it turns out the for the purpose of filing our taxes, all I really need is the price we paid, which I remember (though we need to be able to show the closing papers if we get audited, so I still ordered the copy).
So, for the last few days, Charles has been going through and organizing the zillions of receipts and writing them down by hand, including dates, vendor purpose and price. I told him the minimum total we needed in order to stop, and he went considerably over for a cushion, but stopped before finishing the whole pile.
Today, I entered the information into an Excel spreadsheet and added up the costs (fortunately, adding a long column of numbers is the sole Excel "function" I know how to do). I created a second spreadsheet for our donations to the Salvation Army (that we could find). And then I went online to our old bank and downloaded the mortgage and savings account interest 1099s (because somehow he didn't find the paper versions of THOSE either), the year end summaries of our now-nearly drained savings investments (yay! they did so badly before we drained them to make it through last year that we have hardly ANY profit to pay taxes on!), my HSA tax forms, and my W2, scanned in the closing papers from the sale of the house (at least we had that!), and emailed the whole mess to our accountant. (And then sent her another email an hour later, when Charles found the ACTUAL final closing papers, rather than the estimate, as well as another tax form for the full sales price ... grrr ... I hope that is all of it.)
And all of this was going on while we did the zillions of other things you have to do when you move to a new state and are old - like finding and going to new doctors and dentists, for example.
We may get back to a normal life at some point - once Charles REFILES all the crap in the second bedroom and den, which look like a bomb went off in them. But there is a place for the papers - while he was going through the papers, i bought nice used lateral file cabinets for them to go into, and found additional shelf hangers for them (some were missing). I even found someone who needs all the cardboard boxes that have been emptied in the process, so he doesn't have to do anything to clean up that part of the mess.
I've done my part - now I want a "normal" life back. Maybe start acting like the old people in this retirement community who all seem to be having a LOT of fun.
