Before my real post, I'm going to post a YouTube video of kittens riding on top of a Roomba. Quick, look!

The best part has to be how the kittens just kind of fall off. It reminded me of those games at arcades where you'd put in tokens to try to get more tokens to fall off - the tokens would hang precariously at the edge, just reeaadddddyyy to fall out ... but they never did. Curse those token games.

. . .

Tax time! Yay! Time to get some of that hard-earned money back from Uncle Sam! It's the time of the year when all the stock market taking a dive actually means something! To get a sense of how well I fared, let's just put it this way: I found out there's a limit to the amount you can claim on stock losses in a year (it's $3,000). 

Anyways, I've finally gotten around to e-filing (I had been doing it manually for a while); I had heard such awesome things about TurboTax, that I just had to try it out. And let me just say: it *is* pretty easy.

Except if you're using Scottrade.

I got pretty excited about "Import data from financial service" - I made so many trades this year, I didn't really feel like typing it in manually. Scottrade finally got around to issuing their 1099s this week, so I happily imported Scottrade's data into TurboTax.

And the pretty green "You'll be getting $193 back from the federal government" quickly turned into a "You owe the federal government $47,000 dollars!" Whoa, what? (After I tweeted it, sdether responded with a comment that honestly made me spit out my water: "@honging sounds like you're being groomed for a cabinet position")

Apparently either Scottrade or TurboTax only count proceeds on all stock transactions, and don't bother to calculate the cost basis. Oops.

Well, about 30 minutes later, I managed to fix all that up. But that hiccup aside - I'm pretty happy with the TurboTax experience. I just wish the integration worked better :|