The Worst Parent Ever

Sometimes, after reading posts to forums and articles on parenting, I can't help but wonder, "Am I the worst parent ever?". Let me give you some context. As I said in the previous blog post, we're concerned with the type of education our daughter is going to get going to a public school that has only mediocre ratings. So I spend some of my free time looking at real estate, and some time on real estate blogs. What amazes me about these blogs is the prevalence of posts talking about buying a home for the good school district. And in the Bay Area, where I live, how really you can only buy a home in Palo Alto, Los Altos, or Cupertino if you want a good school.

As you might have guessed, we don't live in any of those cities, nor is buying a home in any of those school districts on our short or long range plans. And so that's where the "worst parent ever" comes from. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only parent not scheming or trying to figure out a way to get my child in a Cupertino or Palo Alto school. And all those posts make it seem like some how I'm depriving my child by not sending her to one of these top tier schools.

That's when I have to remind myself, I went to a mediocre school, and I've had more successes in my life than most people I know, and that the school certainly didn't place any limitations on my achievements or my ability to succeed. But it's hard to keep that point of view in an overwhelming flood of opinion in the opposite direction.

Finding The Right School

I always thought I'd be the type of parent that didn't care about what school my child attended, because we'd (the parents) be the ones that influenced our child and made sure she got the most out of school and learned everything she needed to, so we could make up for any deficit the school might have. This was especially true since I went to a so-so public school, and still managed to graduate near the top of my class, and go to a top notch college.

But reality is never as easy as what we idealize. For our daughter, we thought we'd send her to public school for kindergarten. But then California budget cuts struck, and the idea of sending our daughter to a school where the child to teacher ratio was 33 to 1 just didn't seem like a good idea, when just the year before it was only 20 to 1. So our daughter has spent her kindergarten year in a private elementary school. While we love the school, we don't love the cost of the tuition, and I really don't see us being able to sustain this through the rest of her academic years.

So in January we started looking at public schools and other alternatives again. With our severe disappointment in our home school (who failed to return any calls to us last year), I started looking into the open enrollment process, where you can apply for any school in the district. There were two obvious choices, the lottery schools which were top ranked, and in fact one is the top ranked elementary in the state of California. But we decided that one is way too competitive, and we didn't want our daughter growing up amidst that much competition to succeed. The other lottery school requires parent participation, 4 hours in the classroom during the work week.

So we started looking at the other elementary schools in the district that are close to our home. We found one that's relatively close, is smaller than typical, and still has 20 to 1 child to teacher ratios in 1st to 3rd grade. While its scores aren't the best, they are better than our home school, so we decided to target getting into this elementary school.

Last week, we got our acceptance letter, so it appears we've found a public elementary school for our daughter. But it's been a lot more work than I ever expected, and even then I'm still worried about the quality of the education she's going to receive. It's a surprise to me how much this matters to me, after I was so convinced it wouldn't make a difference.

Getting It Wrong, When You're Right

The IRS did a good thing, when it decided to update Publication 555 that I talked about in my previous blog post. It meant another government institution was recognizing gay marriage, or at least registered domestic partnerships. The bad part about this is how late in the game they did this. The final update to this document came out on March 9, just a little over a month to go before the filing deadline of April 15, 2011.

The bad news for those of us in RDPs or same sex marriages is that many of us were waiting for this update to do our taxes, some because Intuit, maker of TurboTax asked us to because they were going to produce an update to TurboTax that would help us get our taxes done.

March 10, 2011 was the promised date of the TurboTax update. The R13 patch to TurboTax was released on March 9, 2011, a day early, claiming support for IRS publication 555. But in reality there wasn't any support, and an article on their support site pretty much told couples with investment income and rental property, they were out of luck with regards to TurboTax (after asking us to wait until March 10).

So TurboTax, has decided to leave us with no good options for getting our taxes done. It's too late to find a tax professional, as all of them will be booked, so the only alternative is to either hunker down and try to figure this out ourselves and do our taxes using pen and paper the old fashioned way, or file an extension and hope we can find a good professional to help us after the 15th of April.

IRS Publication 555

For those of you that might not yet have heard the news, the IRS has chosen to recognize domestic partnerships in the states that have legalized them and have community property laws, like the state of California where we live. They've also made their decision retroactive to 2007. For most people, this may not affect their taxes at all for the years 2007 to the present, but for some small group of people who are registered domestic partners, live in a community property state, and have disparate incomes between the two individuals in the partnership, this new ruling from the IRS may actually have a huge benefit.

The technical information can be found in the IRS publication 555. If you're using an automated program to do your taxes (like I am with Turbo Tax), you may have to wait to update your taxes. Specifically TurboTax claims the IRS is going to issue an update to 555, and they will issue their update after the new update from the IRS is published.

So what's the big benefit in 555? It allows you to allocate community property between the two partners on the tax return. For example wages is one form of income that can be split between partners. Let's take an imaginary couple, one that makes $10,000 a year and one that makes $100,000 is W-2 wages. Under the new ruling, each member of the partnership can record $55,000 in wages, equally splitting their incomes (and hopefully reducing the overall tax liability). That's good news for couples like ours. For now, I'm going to hold on and see what happens in this latest IRS update, and if TurboTax makes it easier to amend our returns. But if this affects you, you might want to talk to an accountant and see if you have any benefits from this ruling.

Disclaimer: I'm not an accountant, and you should verify all details with the IRS and your own accountant.