a visit from the money fairy!

So, after much annoyance, The Monkey finally had some free time to call and talk to his previous employer's corporate office regarding his W2. Thankfully we didn't have to wait for the damn thing to come in the mail because they had it setup online. Hooray! Since I had all of our other documents readily on hand, I spent an hour this afternoon filing our taxes using TaxACT.com. (A very good service for those of you that file yourself. I paid $16.95 for the 'deluxe' service and they e-filed both our federal and state return, both of which will be direct deposited into our bank account in a couple of weeks!)

I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by our refund amount. Before I entered The Monkey's unemployment income we were already getting over $2,000 back! After I entered the unemployment we were still at $1,300 and I hadn't even entered my education stuff yet! Hoorah! So the grand total for our Federal return this year is going to be about $2,000. About half of what we got last year but I'm not going to complain considering we didn't pay ANY tax on The Monkey's unemployment for 33 weeks!

So then I went on to enter all of our state information. For the past two years we have owed the state of Alabama so I was expecting as much this year especially because of the unemployment income. So la di da... I plugged in all of the numbers and TaxACT did its magic and it said we are getting a REFUND from the state of Alabama this year! Baffled, I ran through everything again. And again. And checked just one more time to make sure it wasn't a fluke. Nope! We are getting about $300 back from the state on top of the $2,000 from Federal. Hoorah!! No more empty savings account! I could even pay off my car, I believe, and still have about $200 left over. But I'm not so sure I want to do that. We started out on this unemployment "adventure" with $3,500 in the savings account and now it is down to $0. We fell back on that money quite a bit, it seems. (Of course, we do a lot of frivilous spending thinking we would have a real income a lot sooner than we did. And I haven't done any real budgeting since the beginning.) However, I'm not planning on being so careless with our chunk o' change this year. Oh oh!! And and and!!! I got an email from my school saying that a refund (!!!) check is in the mail for $976! Yeah, okay, that is Student Loan money but we can definitely USE it. PLUS I thought I owed the school money and was not, by any means, expecting a freaking REFUND! So now I get to call the school tomorrow and register for my next classes -- MY LAST THREE CLASSES UNTIL I GRADUATE!!

So, yeah, this was a happy happy news day!

But now I must go lie down before I fall over from the Lunesta I took about 20 minutes ago.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz