What does it feel like to make almost $5,000 in less than two hours?

Pretty damn good is how we feel! Last night we plunged into the adventure of filing our tax returns for the first half of intern year and we are stoked with how much we got back. Was it complicated to do it ourselves? Not really, it just takes a small amount of patience. I thought we would walk you through a couple steps which we have learned.

1. We bought TurboTax at Costco! I paid about $55 for the Turbotax Premier (because I bought stocks/had dividends last year) and with that you get 5 Federal E-files and one state return. This is great because my family can also use my license code to file their federal tax returns and will just have to pay for their state returns.

2. Things to have ready: W-2 (work form) and 1099 forms anyone has sent you. For example, we both had W-2s from work and tutoring. We also had our 1099- INT form that Citibank sent us for the interest from our high yield savings account. I also was able to link in my investment accounts and TurboTax brought in the dividend/capital gains from there.

3. Mortgage interest – we went to our mortgage site and downloaded the form they gave us that listed the home loan interest we paid.

4. Student loan interest – we paid $2,500 last year to get this one (I think we got $300 back from this).

5. If you are a student, you can go to your student account and download the 1099-T (under finance section on ours) and you get a small deduction from student tuition paid!

There were other deductions you could make; however, you must have proof of expenses and we didn’t have that much to add. We qualified for the standard deduction which we agreed with. It then had us move on to filing our state returns.

I submitted it last night and woke up to an email this morning saying our tax returns were accepted! Now all we have to do is wait for the money to be deposited to our bank account.

Our tax returns are going straight to our emergency fund and we are pretty excited about it!

Any questions? How did you go about filing your taxes?  Comment below!