MONEY MONEY MONEY

We filed our taxes today! WOO Hoo! We're all done!! Very exciting! Except apparently congress piddled around and didn't finish making tax legislation until 2008 for the 2007 taxes so the IRS has to change some programming. They estimate they will be ready to process forms on February 11th. It's very annoying because we want our money NOW!!! But 2 of the changes affect us. 1st - that crazy expensive door we got on the basement nets us a $174 tax CREDIT (deducted from the total tax we pay) for energy efficiency. 2nd - some additional rulings on the $1000 child tax credit. I'm not sure if that actually reduces the adjusted gross income or if it's deducted from the taxes we pay. Either way it's more money in our hot little hands. We used turbo tax. It's super duper easy. It's starts by asking what changed this year? We had a baby and sold a home. On and so and it asks you if everything pertains to you. If you say no then you get to skip it. If you say yes it says gather these forms and fill in these blanks. Easy peasy! OH and they have a new thing where you put all your charitable donations in and it searches ebay and the like to find a fair market value for your stuff that you give to goodwill. Then you just click yes to import the data. Love it!
The other day when the interest rates dropped our mortgage gal called us to see if we want to try to refinance for a lesser interest rate. So we did and we signed today. We dropped 1 interest percentage on our mortgage and 3.5 percentage points on our home equity loan and now they are combined into one loan with only 5.3 percent interest. AND we get to skip February and March payments, except we already paid February so that will just decrease our payoff balance and therefore loan total. AND we'll get a reimbursement check from the title company for prepaid stuff that no longer applies AND we'll get some escrow back. Yippee! We did find out that our taxes went up. Apparently our side of the Warren Ave bridge went up significantly and the other side decreased...lucky ducks! It's $80...I forgot to ask is that per 6 months since we pay every 6 months. It can't be every month! So we're just assuming every 6 months otherwise we'd be livid! I think the Health Department guy did at least $80 worth of work on our behalf for the RSV shot fiasco so I'm okay with the tax increase.
Hopefully the economic stimulus package goes through so we get $600 each plus $300 for one baby. We decided if we get the $1500 we will use it as it was intended to stimulant the economy by BUYING STUFF!!! If they give us less we'll put it into our Orange savings and earn interest to spite their stingy butts!