Saturday, March 15, 2014

Personal Life Update: Thwarted Again

I went to a friend's house today to use the internet for tax purposes. I was expecting it to be somewhat complicated, but I wasn't expecting it to fail to work outright. I am half-way through a request for income-based repayment of my student loans (basically, if you make less than you owe, you owe nothing per month, though interest continues to accrue ('capitalize', become principal)), but would have finished it today if the IRS personal financial information retrieval service would function. It told me it couldn't find any of my information. Back to the pre-internet age with me. And while my mother was doing her taxes, the advisor mentioned that money paid to the university last year, even if it was a loan, could be claimed for a deduction (I presume that was it), but the question was whether the disbursement was made January 2013 or later. Since I didn't have any paper documents on hand to answer that question, and since I didn't remember offhand, I'm going to need to call up the university by phone and find out. If they were made within the last fiscal year, then I'll need to find out how much was paid in tuition, for her taxes. 

This is one reason I'm not such a huge fan of doing everything on-line. It's because no matter how advanced newer technologies get, there'll always be a place for phone calls and paper mail. At least, there always is, in my experience, so it's nice to have stamps, envelopes, printers, and telephones handy when reconciling financial information.

~ Rak Chazak

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