I am the one who does the taxes in my family. I hate doing taxes. Actually, doing taxes means simply gathering everything I have to gather to take to the CPA. But it’s not an easy task. No matter how organized I am, it’s still a big headache and takes me DAYS. Days I tell you. Absolutely ridiculous.

The thing I hate most is having to do the accounting for stock option and ESPP sales. Why these freakin’ companies can NOT put the cost basis information on their statements is BEYOND me. I mean they have computers. I will admit to actually having several hundred shares of Microsoft ESPP stock from YEARS YEARS YEARS ago that I haven’t sold, just because I DREAD doing the cost basis calculations on it.

The worst offender in our family is my husband. He now is no longer allowed to do any stock selling EVER! His former employer gave him: ESPP, Restricted stock, Nonqualified stock options AND incentive stock options. It is so complicated! And… to make it even worse, when they gave him restricted stock, they would sell some of it automatically (triggering a tax event of course!) to pay for something. UGH! So now, we get these statements that say you sold X number of shares in Feb 2003. But it doesn’t tell you WHAT shares were sold, when they were purchased, etc. The statements only contain part of the information needed for the IRS. The most horrid companies to deal with are USB Financial (formerly Paine Webber) and Etrade.

In the “They are a great brokerage” column, just to be fair…. Fidelity is who now manages all our stuff and they have the most AWESOME statements at the end of the year that require no work on my part. I just hand them to the CPA. I will never leave them just because of their awesome reporting. And its the main reason we, after this year, will have ONLY stuff at Fidelity.

So I’m sitting here blogging instead of doing taxes, while my poor husband is off trying to remember what stock sold for what on what day and how it is all reverse split adjusted and trying to cost basis compute it. Sounds like fun eh?

Ok… thanks for letting me rant. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming. Click.

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