Tax Time!

Remember to file your taxes by April 30, 2012 for the year 2011.

I have been doing my own taxes since 2002, that’s when I started my first job.  My parent’s friend who is also our neighbor always did our taxes.  Since I didn’t want him to find out my pathetic yearly salary at that time, I filed my taxes online with Quicktax aka Turbotax for like $12.95.  But every year they would increase their price for their online version.  A standard return for Turbotax nowadays is going for $17.99 plus tax.  One year I prepaid a cheaper version Ufile, but I found out that I didn’t like their calculations and went back to Quicktax.  I paid twice as much.  What a waste of money.  So I say, “screw that!”

Studio Tax is a free downloadable windows based program for Canadians to file their taxes online.  Of course, this isn’t the most user friendly guide like other tax programs that charges a fee.  It’s pretty basic, to the point, like an online paper version that CRA makes you fill out by hand.  They do have a Wizard that you go through like a questionnaire.  After you finish up your return, you can NETFILE with CRA to get a quicker refund only if you don’t owe money and save paper  🙂

My capital gain from 2011 is only at $2945.65 with 32 trades… made a lot of mistakes in 2011.  This year I promise to be more disciplined.  It’s not bad considering I took a big loss in RIM $1489.90 and NOT $3519.99, and some other stocks.  I did a preliminary test run of my tax return.  Looks like I’ll be getting $3k back only cause I funneled a lot into my RRSP contributions.  I still haven’t received my T3s.  They won’t come till early April.  Can’t wait to receive my refund!!