Too bad those deductions for payment processing fees went away with the rest of the misc deductions.
Maybe he bought a Bugatti. We don’t know, man. 
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I wrote my response before you added info about the double cash card. By “DC” I meant debit card.
Ok, gotcha. My misunderstanding.
Well, it’s sales tax + RE tax + mortgage interest…Just peaked over $13k
My long ago requested tax forms finally arrived today via USPS. Guess the impact of the shut down has at last been overcome. IRS made a very nice presentation of the new 1040 and all the new numbered schedules together in booklet form. Everything looks quite official, the way I like this stuff to appear.
I had already completed a good bit of my tax work preliminarily. Now will fill out new forms and send everything off.
Whereas I, who didn’t get 2 of my 1099’s until mid-Feb., and didn’t insist on getting paper copies of forms/instructions that are readily available online, have had my taxes electronically filed for about 2 weeks already. 
Congrats on your splendid filing performance. You deserve a great deal of credit and respect, and you have mine for certain. You have done wonderfully well.
As for myself, I do not want that e-filing label on my back. I confess to you, but only here anonymously, I’m perfectly capable of e-filing. That is a fact I’m willing to share with you, but not with the IRS if I can help it. And I can. I want them to regard me as an old, rural, not close to being up to speed, hick . . . . struggling and just barely able to file at all on my own. I’ve no interest whatsoever in betraying my technical prowess to the IRS, or to my state tax authorities either, for that matter.
That doesn’t make sense. By filing on paper, you 100% guarantee a person working for the IRS is looking at your return. There is no guarantee a person looks at your return when you efile. Also, while you probably aren’t going to make a mistake, paper filed returns are WAY more likely to contain mistakes than efiled returns. The IRS knows this and scrutinizes paper returns more because of it. A lot of the benefits you perceive from still filing your return on paper are 100% in your head and are actually completely counter to what you think is happening. You sound like you are very thorough, so I doubt you will have an issue. But filing on paper is not doing what you think it is doing.
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Meanwhile, I’m furious with Fidelity. I’ve had everything I need to file for about 3 weeks now, but cannot because of one of their funds which paid a minuscule amount of foreign tax, and I need to know the percentage of foreign income that my dividends reflect. Fidelity won’t release that until all the information for ALL of their funds has completed that accounting. Vanguard and T. Rowe Price includes that information for most of their funds in late Jan/early Feb. Fidelity is now saying near end of March.
It’s a matter of pennies, but it is keeping me from filing. And penalties for under withholding are rising day by day.
I’m pretty sure most in that demographic have a tax preparer (be it a paid preparer, or family/friend) prepare and e-file their return.
Heck, I bet most with that profile get excited about the refund anticipation loan that comes with getting the return prepared.
I find my plausible deniability wherever I can. 
Earlier in this thread, I think, some folks mentioned FreeTaxUSA. I have been pretty happy with it so far. Coming over from Taxact after many years… I was surprised that FreeTaxUSA did a great job importing my previous return (PDF).
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If it’s really a matter of pennies, then it won’t matter because you are rounding to the nearest dollar, right? Fidelity screwed me in the past with an amended 1099 at the end of March. It was the first time I had to figure out how to file an amended tax return. That is why I stopped filing my return early. I hope I never have to do that again.
BTW, my consolidated 1099 from Fidelity was available on 1/25 with the amount of foreign tax paid so I don’t know why yours is delayed.
Many partnerships and funds just released K-1s today, and many are still outstanding. So, if the Fidelity fund has investments in those, they can’t prepare their information returns until they receive them from the underlying companies. It may not be Fidelity’s fault (OTOH, it may be their “fault,” just really no way to know without knowing the actual fund).
Yes, it has the amount of foreign tax paid, but to take the Foreign Tax Credit, you have to document the amount of foreign source income (see Form 1116). If this fund were the only fund for which I take the foreign tax credit, I could simply ignore. But I have other funds for which the foreign tax is significant. And you can’t pick and choose … you have to handle foreign tax as all ignored, all deducted, or all as a credit. In short, I can’t file an accurate return without this information.
I have no problem with Fidelity saying that they won’t have information on every single one of their foreign tax paying funds until late March. What I have an issue with is their refusal to publish the information as the numbers are finalized. Nobody else does that as far as I know.
The fund is FIENX, by the way.
Oh, yeah, that’s fair. You’d think that would be a pretty simple calculation that could be automated.
You may be right, but of the dozen or so that I know in that group, they’re with shinobi - although probably not for the same reasons. 
I wonder whether there is data on audit rates of e-filers vs. paper filers.
My guess is that there is not much difference outside of people messing up entries and calculations. Part of our company handles a mix of paper and electronic documents so assuming the IRS does it similarly, my guess is the audit part, even for paper filers, is handled automatically until a machine flags it for manual review.
A low-paid job is to get those paper returns, then get them scanned and OCRed. The person scanning them in does not read them, only insures that the scan is OCRable. Then it’s probably routed automatically to be computer-checked just like e-files are.
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