I hate taxes. Not necessarily the fact that we have to pay them, but the actual process of preparing one’s taxes. I mean, I freaking fled the country, and still the government is managing to bite me in the butt and steal away precious time and money I will never get back.

I didn’t always feel this way. Up until this year, paying my taxes was a breeze. Since most of those years I was a college student who only worked part-time, it was a simple matter to plug in a couple of numbers and hit submit. Last year, I even got a REFUND. Like, serious money. All for filling out a simple form. It was great.

Well, skip ahead a year, and I now find out that I have to pay TAXES on that big, beautiful refund from last year. Oh, and that’s not all. In the last year I have gone from being single to married, and from living in the U.S. to living abroad, and from having one modest income to one significantly larger and one much smaller, off-the-books foreign incomes. AND my parents sold a bunch of stock in my name to pay for my wedding, so I have to report that and, potentially, pay a butt-load of capital gains on it.

I say “potentially” because even though I have gone through the grueling process of submitting the required information for this cursed tax return, I still have no idea how much I’ll actually owe. Because my husband works for a giant international company outside the US, there are all sorts of tricky tax laws that do or do not apply to us, so the company is kind enough to “do our taxes for us.”

Do our taxes for us! Well, that sounds great. Except that I still had to spend hours and hours tracking down documents and inputting every minute detail into a very tedious online form, just as I would do if I were filing on my own. But since they are “doing it for us,” we have to wait and see what the final outcome will be after everything is tallied up. In theory, the majority of our income shouldn’t be taxed at all since it was earned outside the US, and since our company deducts a “hypothetical tax” from each paycheck (don’t even ask me what that is, because I have no clue). But then you have my W-2 from the three months of 2012 that I actually was working in the US, and those pesky stock sales to consider. So who knows?

I’ve always heard that there are tax benefits to getting married. And one of the major perks of living and working abroad is not having to pay taxes. But I’ll believe it when I see it, hopefully sometime before April 15^th.