It looks like I’ll be getting some money back from the IRS this year after all. I claimed credits for interest on the house, some charitable contributions (heheh), and since I work from home, I claimed a percentage of my house payments and utility costs. Also, the person doing my taxes said I can claim mileage for driving to work every week, which ended up helping a ton. It’s 146 miles round-trip, and the government pays 32 cents a mile, so it ended up coming to about $2600. It would have been less, because I was just going to use 55 fuel receipts (55 being the number of trips I made last year), but the IRS requires you to use the 32 cents a mile calculation, which equaled about $47 a trip, but it only takes me about $35 to fill up my truck with fuel (one tank, anyway).
I wish I knew how my employer managed to take out way too little taxes last year. I filled out my W-4 according to the instructions, so you’d figure they’d take the correct amount out. Filing taxes for this year will be much better–I’m going to bitch to my employer so they take out the right amount of taxes, plus I get to claim one dependent and a child tax credit, each of which I think is a $2800 credit.