Good & Bad

For the past couple of years we have been having our taxes done by a gentleman who comes into the bank where I used to work. He volunteers his time and does this service for free. Wally is great but he is getting up there in age and his sight isn't quite what it used to be. Last Wednesday we went down to the bank to have our taxes done - I had done some rough calculations and guesstimated what we would be getting back. It was by far the largest we've ever received. So we went and met with Wally and the final number he came up with was good but not quite what I was expecting. On Sunday night I couldn't sleep and decided to see if I could find a way to e-file our taxes for free. I found a couple sights and proceeded to punch in our numbers - no matter what I did though I could not even get close to the number that Wally came up with. My number was almost 3 times what he had put down. I decided to go to sleep, I figured I would work on it some more in the morning. I found the part where the figures differed - it was in the amount of tax that we were supposed to pay in. Wally had put down that we were responsible for almost $10k but the number that the other software came up with was closer to $7k. I went up to the IRS website and found our tax bracket. Wally had accidentally put down the number for "single" instead of "married filing jointly". SCORE!! I'm so happy because now we will definitely get enough back to put new carpet in the house.
Now onto the bad thing. Back in August when Logan was only a week old Mike got into a car accident and totalled our 1999 Mustang. He got cited for a ticket but the cop told him to set up a court date and the cop would not contest the ticket. Mike requested a court date and it was set for Dec. 20th. We had planned on going back to ND for Christmas so Mike hired a lawyer to take care of it. I sent her the $350 and she sent Mike an email confirmation saying she would take care of it. Well today when I got the mail there was something in there from the Dept. of Licensing - I opened it and it stated that as of 4-13-06 at 12:01 am Mike's license would be suspended because he FAILED TO SHOW UP FOR THE HEARING!! What?!? I called the lawyer, she didn't know what was going on. A couple minutes later she called back and said that the last time Mike had hired her was in 2004 (different accident). Ummm, no - we hired you in December. I informed her that I sent the money to her through Paypal. We are still trying to figure out how this happened and Mike is going to be calling her tomorrow to find out what needs to be done now. I just can't get over the fact that she accepted the money and emailed Mike confirming the information and then completely dropped the ball!