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With all the paperwork coming in to our homes to help us file our taxes now is a great time to get organized to maximize your return next year. If you live in a state that has state sales tax (which Washington does) and the sales tax is significant (for us it is 9%) it can benefit you to keep track of how much you spend in sales tax throughout the year.

This sales tax is tax deductible, we use to take the minimum amount (if you don’t save receipts) but this past year we started saving our sales receipts and the amount was signifigantly higher then the “estimated” amount resulting in a larger refund. To simplify this process we simply inputted our sales tax in a spreadsheet and totalled each month how much we had spent. All the reciepts were put in an envelope with the month written on the outside for our documentation should we be audited. This took very little time, since we keep our receipts for budget purposes and the savings was significant enough to make it worth our time.

What things to you save or document to maximize your tax refund?