So we're assuming that I as Joe Singleguy, I live by myself, my parents can't claim me as a dependent anymore, I don't live with them, I'm not dependent on the financial support from them, this is how I'm surviving based on my own work and productivity, so I'm not going to check either of those out. And then if someone can claim you or your spouse if a joint return as a dependent, check the applicable boxes below and enter the amount from the worksheet on back. Adjusted gross income, and we'll talk a little bit about why they're saying gross income, because we're essentially going to talk about taxable income in a few lines from now, but let's just add these so this plus this is going to be $40,057.50. And then in box number three here, unemployment compensation and Alaska Permanent Fund dividends, well I didn't get any unemployment benefits so I'll just leave that blank, add lines one, two, and three, this is your adjusted gross income. And so in my 1099 form, I had $57.50 of interest from my savings account. So your taxable interest, this will tend to, you tend to get this information from your banks, they will give you a 1099 interest form, so these are the types of things that you will be getting in the mail after that first year of work, you'll get these in the new year, you should get a W-2, you should get these 1099 forms, and these give you all the information you need to actually fill out these boxes. Now taxable interest, if the total is over $1500, you cannot use form 1040 EZ. So when I look at my form and I look at box one, my wages, salaries, and tips, I get 40, I have an even $40,000. So we have another video on the W-2 form, this will come from your employer if you have one employer, if you had multiple employers in the previous year, then you will have multiple W-2s and the W-2 should go in the beginning, you should get it at the end or you should get it at the beginning of the new year so if we're filing taxes for 2013, we should be filling out this form some time in early 2014, after we got our W-2 and you usually get your W-2 in January of the new year, so January, probably January of 2014. This should be shown in box one of your form or forms, W-2. Let's just say you don't wanna do that, and so let's just get to the meat of the actual form now. Checking a box below will not change your tax refund. (chuckles) So let's see what else here, foreign country name, well we're just assuming that he's based, that I'm, I'm Joe Singleguy, I'm based in the US so I wouldn't fill out any of this and then check here if you or your spouse filing jointly want $3 to go to this fund for presidential elections. My social security number, 12, I hope I don't experience any identity theft by giving this away, and let's see, I'm assuming he's single so there's no spouse name over for this line and then the address, so 123 Main Street and I live in Big City, let me write a little bit neater, the IRS needs to be able to read this, Big Big City, California, and my zip code is 12345, which I don't think is an actual zip code in California but I think you get the picture, I'm trying to prevent identity theft here. But let's say my name, my first name, let's say it's Joe and my last name, I'm Joe Singleguy, Joe Singleguy, I guess it'll be a strange name once I get married but I'll just go with it. So up here, there's just your basic information, so let's see, and I'm just gonna assume that I'm filling this out as a single individual but you could also fill it out as married. And this isn't going to be for everyone, it tends to not be for people with parents or people with an income over 100,000 or homeowners or people who have I guess more complex either income or they have a lot of deductions that they might wanna itemize but it tends to be a pretty good tax form for folks who are filing their taxes for the first time, might only have one job and have a fairly simple financial picture so let's just go through this and then obviously it might get more complex or it will get more complex as you decide that you can't use this form, that you have to use a more fancy form. And I'm going to start with, or at least in this video, I'm going to use the most simple of the IRS forms, 1040EZ, literally, I guess because it's supposed to be easy. So what I wanna do in this video is really show you an example of filling out your taxes and hopefully giving you a little bit of context for why the form looks like it does or where you might find the relevant information. Filling out your taxes can be intimidating for anyone and especially if you've never done it before.
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