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@abctax55 wrote:

Jeeze....  didn't see THAT forest for the trees.  Rick, your brain is working way too well for a Sat a.m.

Nah, I spent half a day banging my head into the wall on this stuff back in December when the draft forms came out.  So I've had time for the wounds to heal.

I have a Recap spreadsheet that mimics the tax return and I've had to do major revisions every year for the last three years because they keep changing the tax forms (and laws).  In my attempt to optimize deductions, I started with all sorts of nested if statements trying to logic my way through this mess and kept running into circular calculation problems.  Then I finally realized all I needed was a subtotal of AGI before the potential charity deduction and then I needed to evaluate [total itemized] vs. [standard plus the lesser of $300 or cash_charity].  It's March already and it seems like I'm still finding at least one bug per week in the spreadsheet.  This week's bug involved the tax calculation for MFS.  Next week's bug will be that it doesn't subtract up to $10.2K of unemployment. 🙂  I suspect I'll need to add another subtotal in the margin somewhere for Section 85 MAGI.  Oh boy!