Money sucks... or rather, not having enough of it! in Another Open Diary refugee

John had our taxes done yesterday - they charged us $200 to do them and guess what? The return will just cover their fee for processing it. :( As usual, since we don’t own a damned house we fall below the limit for itemised deductions and therefore get almost nothing back even though he said we would because of all our medical bills etc… sigh. He’s still hopeful - you’re only allowed $500 unitemised charitable deduction and I spent at least $1000 on Ruth’s Ministry, so he made me write out a list of everything I gave them. It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be, since I usually bought the same products and almost always at the Dollar Tree - it’s not like I had to list 1000 seperate items, I just put shampoo and conditioner $100, candy $50 etc. The other way to do it would have been January $100, Feb $100 etc. I spent $25 a week on supplies for them with very few exceptions (I didn’t donate in October or November because we were dealing with our buggy problem…) And then he got me to sit down and try to make an itemised list of our losses due to the damnable bed bugs because apparantly they might possibly be claimable if we lost a certain amount of stuff. I think think we quite make the limit for deductability, but those accursed bugs cost us $4000! Add in our move this year (at least $3000 in expenses, partly paid for by my parents or we never would have been able to move) and apparently $12000 worth of medical expenses for 2013 (this years won’t be even a quarter of that - we can’t afford to go to the doctor any more) and it’s no wonder that we’re struggling to get from week to week… Money sucks!

On the good news front, we’re going up to Orlando for the weekend to see John’s sister and brother-in-law… hopefully John won’t get home too late tonight so we can drive up this evening. Otherwise it will have to be tomorrow morning… and Monday is a bank holiday, so John gets a three day weekend. :)