Taxes

I hate taxes. They have been our major source of stress since we've been married. As a self-employed welder, we had to pay lots of taxes, lots and lots of taxes. It didn't help that we had terrible accountants who did absolutely nothing to help us (we even had one that cussed Cameron one time.) We apparently didn't know how to keep books like we should. We would think that we finally had it all figured out, then we'd still have to pay 2 to 3 times more than other welders that made around the same in a year that we did. It was so frustrating! Finally, after we had gotten out of the self employment racket and were doing the previous year's return, we found an accountant who was wonderful... a little crazy, but really really good at her job. She showed me exactly what to put where for the maximum deduction, etc, and saved us thousands that year. For our '08 return, Cameron was still self employed for some of the year, and worked for a company for the rest of it, so we still had to pay some taxes, but not much, and I did the return myself. This year, however, was the first year that we were completely employed by someone else, so I was very curious what kind of a refund we'd get, if anything. I just finished, and holey moley, we got a refund! A big one!! At least it's big to us! It's probably a lot more than what we'll get from here on, because Brynna was born in '09 and we had to pay all of our doctors and hospital bills out of pocket, so we got pretty big breaks for that. I'm so excited. I called to tell Cameron and it left him speechless, which is very hard to do! The last two years have been the most stressful for the two of us, 99% caused by finances. This just seems like a little gift from above, a little "don't worry, I'm still looking out for y'all, you'll be OK." I've shed many tears over taxes, but never from joy!