The Season Can Be Taxing on Couples Too

Dena Anderson sums up tax season at her house in two words: overwhelming and stressful.

“My husband and I are really tense at this time of year as we prepare our taxes,” said Dena, 30, who lives in Huntington Beach. “Our main problem is disorganization. I’ll run around the house looking for documents, and when I can’t find one, we’ll start debating over who had the information last.”

No matter how well-adjusted a couple is, tax time tends to put spouses in a high-stress bracket, said Victoria Collins, a registered investment adviser at Keller, Coad & Collins in Irvine, who is also a psychologist and author of “Couples and Money” (Bantam Books, 1992, $4.99)

“What depreciates the most in April is a couple’s patience, caring and ability to communicate,” said Collins. “If a relationship is already rocky, tax time can create a lot of conflict.”

Preparing taxes is generally not an easy task, she says. “It always takes more time than the couple anticipated to gather the necessary information, which often means working late into the night and on weekends.”

When a couple do their own taxes, things get especially complicated.

“Even the most intelligent people find the tax preparation process inordinately complex,” Collins said.

If one spouse does all of the preparation and 9the couple owe money, the other person may blame the preparer. After hours of sifting through paperwork and adding, the preparer understandably becomes irate about questions of accuracy.

Things also get tense when each partner has a different deadline mentality. “I often see one partner who is completely ready in the beginning of March and another who isn’t ready until close to the April deadline,” Collins said.

Record-keeping differences will also cause tempers to fly. If one partner has everything in perfect order and the other person hasn’t bothered to use a check register, there’s bound to be friction.

One of the biggest causes of stress at tax time is that finances are literally laid out on the table for close examination. What was spent and earned in the last year is there in black and white and can’t be disputed or ignored.

“It’s very stressful to look at our financial situation every year and see that a lot is going back out in taxes,” said Dena Anderson, who is a product trainer for office equipment.

Dena’s husband, Cliff Anderson, 32, agrees. “Tax time forces us to look at our financial situation, and it’s discouraging,” said Cliff, who is an engineer. “We often don’t have much left when we thought we had something. Instead, we seem to be living from tax season to tax season.”

Besides analyzing what’s paid out in taxes, the Andersons also find themselves reviewing their lifestyle with a critical eye.

“We’ll look at what we spent the previous year and (say to) ourselves, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have taken that vacation and put the money into a tax-deferred account instead,’ ” Dena said. “Then we’ll analyze major purchases and sometimes subtly blame whoever wanted to make the purchase.”

Tax time also makes the Andersons curious about their friends’ finances.

“We wonder how are friends are making it and often think we’re the only ones who are stressed about taxes,” Dena said. “Money is a really taboo subject, so we can’t ask our friends about their finances in order to make a comparison.”

Uncertainty also arises when couples are new to tax preparation. Yukie and Mike Meyers of Irvine were married nine months ago and are experiencing their first tax season together.

“This is my first time doing my own taxes, because my parents always took care of mine for me,” said Yukie, 30, who works in commercial property management. “Mike used to do the easy form, so he didn’t know much either. We were both at a loss.”

Because Mike works full time, has a part-time coaching job and goes to school full time, the burden of preparing the taxes fell on Yukie’s shoulders. At first she felt inadequate for not having learned how to prepare tax forms.

“I have an MBA, but I didn’t learn about taxes in school,” she said.

Yukie’s crash course in tax preparation proved to be confusing. Not having her husband’s help was difficult, as well.

“Even though I understood that Mike couldn’t help me because of his full schedule, it was frustrating to do it all by myself,” said Yukie, who is also pregnant. “Mike and I started arguing about little things, because we were so stressed about the taxes.”

Mike, 30, who works in residential property management, says he felt bad about not being able to help.

“It used to take me 10 minutes to do my taxes, but now that we own a home and have a family coming, things are more complex,” he said. “I was really frustrated that I couldn’t be an integral part of the whole process. And I felt guilty that Yukie had to do it all, especially when I could see that she was tired.”

Mike agrees that they were both unusually short-tempered.

“We would snap at each other over nothing. In hindsight, I realize it was the taxes.”

Next year, no matter how busy they are, the Meyerses will set aside time to prepare taxes together. They’ve also started a filing system for 1995 receipts and necessary information, which they hope will simplify things.

Once the tax information was collected and the accountant appointment completed, the Meyerses were still on edge waiting to hear if they owed money.

“We were concerned we might have to pay,” he said. “We just found out we’re getting money back, and that was a huge relief.”

The possibility of owing Uncle Sam still looms for the Andersons.

“Last year we owed money, and I’m worried that this year we will too,” Dena said. “We had a tax appointment in February but had to cancel because of work conflicts. Since then I haven’t rescheduled. Intellectually, I know we must find out how much we owe, but another part of me prefers to avoid the whole thing.”