Not poor enough to be poor, not rich enough to be rich.

Let's see, who was making promises about helping out the middle class? Just wondering so we could give them a call.

We've already begun filing for our taxes this year, and it was more of a headache than last year. This is because most (if not all) online tax filers have changed their requirements for who gets to file for free. We admit, we didn't do our homework right away. We just logged back on to the site we used last year (because we could file free last year with them) and got ALL the way done with our taxes when the screen asked if we would like to pay for their service by credit card or deducting from our return. It was getting late, so we decided to sleep on the decision. $14.95 is not a terrible price for making the process of doing taxes so easy, but on the other hand that is money we could definitely use.

So the next morning we just decided to bite the bullet and pay for the service. We logged back on to the site and continued to file our taxes. Because we are so strapped for money, we decided to pay for the service by deducting it from our return and not use our debit/credit card. Much to our dismay, this convenience is another $30! So all in all, this service would be costing us $45! Um, no thanks!

We did some online research about online tax services. We recommend going to both the IRS site (www.irs.gov) because it tells you what each website's requirements are for free filing, and this site (http://blog.filife.com/free-file-which-of-its-free-tax-filing-sites-is-best) because it has a really nice ranking chart of many tax filing sites. *editors note: blogger was being funny about inserting these sites so I just typed them out for you

In the end, we did have to completely re-file our federal taxes. But it was worth it because it was totally free, and ended up getting a bigger return! This sounds like a cheesy paid advertisement, but H+R Block saved the day. Now for the state taxes. Unfortunately we haven't found any site in which we qualify to file for free online. But our state does have a nice online worksheet that calculates everything for you, and you just print it.

Here's the deal Mr. Obama: we are required to do taxes and we want to be "green" about it. Why not offer free tax filing services for all? Or at least a voucher for basic services?