My response to Jacob's comment became long enough to be another post, and I decided to categorize this as 'Stewardship', which is a topic I am passionate about. Hopefully more will follow in this area; now back to Jacob's question.
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The simple answer is, I'm not; because doing taxes is completely backward-looking it's impossible to 'do' them now. The real answer is that I'm projecting what my taxes *will* most likely be.
Why? To calculate my 'free' loan (my likely return) to the Federal and State governments and therefore to determine the number of withholdings. For instance, what if I determine I'll get a return. Should I or my spouse continue to pay the current level of withholdings? No.
Also, it helps me see how I'm doing with respect to the likelihood of itemizing deductions. And ask the question - how much more do I need to give (cash charity) in order to itemize and therefore take advantage of further deductions (Goodwill, etc).
By putting it all in Excel it also enables me to determine other info - specifically I'm working out how large a partial rollover should be from a Traditional IRA account (formerly a 401k) to a Roth IRA and balance out what would have been a return. (i.e. use a tax return to balance the additional tax because of the conversion). Tax tables would make this type of scenario planning a pain.
If income and giving is fairly consistent then this type of planning only needs to be done once or twice a year. If major transitions occur (job changes, new pre-tax deductions, new tax credits, etc) then the planning can be used to assess the impact.
In a slightly larger scope, the government provides tax forms in PDF, not Excel. So over the last few years I've worked on and off each tax season to develop them for my own use.
Posted by Jeremy Showalter at July 21, 2004 03:41 PMGotcha. So, now that you live so close, I'm sure you'll be glad to work on my taxes as well, since you are so passionate about it. ;) Thanks, Bro!
Posted by: Jacob at July 22, 2004 01:53 PM