I got home from working out last Friday - hey, I was being productive on my unemployment vacation and exercising!- and decided to be a helpful roommate and collect the mail. My roommates and I are not very dedicated mail collectors, and as I typically only receive bills, junk mail, and 10,000 Victoria's Secret catalogs per month, I'm especially lax in going out to check the mailbox for our house. Upon retrieving the mail last Friday, I immediately wished I had continued to slack in my mail collection duties.
Apparently, there are two certainties in unemployment: feeling like a loser, and taxes. The IRS, in its all-knowing malevolence, decided to wait until I had decided to quit my job to send me a letter informing me that my 2008 tax form didn't match their records for what I earned in 2008 and that I owed them the nice tidy sum of nearly $18,000, payable by July 28.
Now, I fully admit that for me, filling out a tax form is a bit like handing a blind person a wad of darts and facing them in the opposite direction of the dart board. Especially anything involving capital gains and investments. Looking at my tax form and what the IRS sent me, I am 99.9% sure I did fill out my tax forms incorrectly. I'm also 99.9% sure there is no way I owe $18,000. To owe $18,000 would mean I had to have made at least $100K in capital gains. Considering 2008 was the year my investments - and everyone else in America's investments - went kablooey, I'm pretty darn tootin' sure that I didn't make at least $100K off my investments.
So now, instead of interspersing my job searching with reruns of the Golden Girls and the occasional trash Bravo TV show, I'll now be interspersing my job searching with desperately trying to figure out how much money I do or do not owe the IRS. And potentially selling plasma, eggs, a kidney, or all of the above to pay off $18K in money I apparently made but never saw a penny of.
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