As tax season approaches you should be receiving all of your documents to begin filing your taxes. I did a friends taxes a few nights ago and I found something interesting that I do not remember seeing before. There was a line on form 1040 that allows you to claim the standard deduction but also allows you to deduct the smaller amount of your property taxes paid or $500 ($1,000 if married filing jointly).
This will provide and extra $500 deducion if you do not have enought deductions to itemize. If you don’t like doing taxes as most people don’t and use software, please spend a little bit of time at the IRS website looking at the forms and reading the instructions as some of them may help you. My friend was going to file a 1040EZ and would not have received this benefit if he had used that form.
I hope to do a review of some of the tax software soon.
