Taxes & The Atom

Today I did my taxes. I normally take my taxes to my accountant Mike who has done them for the past 14 years. But 2014 wasn't a great work year for me as I only worked 5 weeks out of the entire year and didn't make that much. So I asked him if it was better for me to do my taxes myself and save me the cost of him doing them. Being awesome as he is he said if I CAN do my own taxes he'd suggest that I do them myself to save the money.

So I went to the H&R Block website but somehow a Turbotax page popped up and I didn't noticed so I started filling in the information. According to Turbo tax filing Federal taxes are free and there is a fee of $9.99 for state taxes. I'm well into filing (maybe an hour has passed) and I answer one of the many questions and a window pops up informing me that I can't file taxes using this "free" version that I have to purchase the deluxe version for $34.99. I was a bit annoyed but not totally surprised so I purchased the upgrade and continued filing my taxes. Federal was done and moved on to State. That went fairly quick and then I got to the end and it said that I would have to pay $121.97 to file my taxes. I was shocked as this isn't to far off of what I pay my tax guy to do my taxes. I noticed that they somehow slipped in "Audit protection" for $49.99 so I had to back track a few pages until I found the way they slipped that in and fixed it.

So now my Federal was $39.99 but my State wasn't $9.99 as it claimed at the beginning, it was now $36.99 for a total of $71.98. Now that's a far cry from being Free but it's less then half of what I normally pay my tax guy and the fact that I'm getting a refund I just said screw it and completed the transaction and filed my taxes.  Come to find out that the $9.99 for State taxes was the starting price (which they had in very tiny writing that I didn't see), so obviously California is one of the more expensive states. Needless to say it took me about two hours to file but I'm happy it's done and that I'm getting a refund from State and Federal... so yay me!!!!

The producers of Arrow released a full body picture of Brandon Routh's The Atom costume from an upcoming episode of Arrow. I'm a huge Brandon Routh fan, loved him since Superman Returns and was so excited when they added him to the cast of Arrow in season three. I didn't know he was going to be The Atom at first thinking that they just brought him in for a love triangle with Oliver, Felicity and Ray (Brandon's character) but the past few weeks the characters have been talking about this new exoskeleton suit and it looks as though we will get to see it in a few weeks.. can't wait!!!!