Thanks for the advice. You’re spot on with the deductions thing. Most years we only got back a couple hundred Federal and usually owed around 50.00 State but 2005 killed us. We wrote off over 24K in interest plus around 6K in property taxes on our Temecula house. We’d never had anything so big as that write off and didn’t know that we should have adjusted our deductions that year. Ended up getting back almost 9K between Fed and State…that money could have been doing a lot more in our CD! Lesson learned though and since we sold in mid 2006 we only had 1/2 that interest to write off so we we were back to normal…Now 2007 taxes are going to make me cry. Nothing to write off for the whole year – can’t even set up an IRA to “shelter” a few grand cuz we contribute to hubby’s 401K. Oh well, guess I’ll have to console myself with the fact by not owning this last year we’ve been able to fund 401K to the max and the stocks we sold are still sitting in the bank – unlike past years where we had no wiggle room in the budget to do the 401K and any stocks sold went directly to pay property taxes and homeowners insurance.
I really wish they taught the financial basics in High School. Having to learn this stuff as we go is tough..Hopefully we’re teaching our daughter as we go so she won’t make the same mistakes we’ve made…she’ll make new ones right?
