In case anyone doing embryo adoption (or any other medical treatment) is interested, I wanted to share our experience of itemizing for our taxes. I am NOT by any means a professional, but maybe this can point you in the right direction.
-We used Turbo.Tax, as we always do. No problems. We did pay $45 for audit protection since we've never itemized before, just incase. The program did speculate that we have a low chance of being audited.
-Our standard deduction was around $12.5k (married filing jointly). To claim medical, our total deductions (for us things like mortgage and student loan interest, in addition to medical) had to be more than that. We could claim any medical over 10% of our AGI. Once we added up all our medical and subtracted 10% of AGI, we had around $16k. So, it was worth it for us.
-We tracked medical expenses on a spreadsheet by date and included date, provider name, which one of us it was for, amount, and mileage to appointment (if applicable). As it turns out, Turbo Tax asks for it by category (facility, provider, pharmacy, lab, etc), so we had to divide the spreadsheet up by category.
-We were not able to claim premiums paid on insurance since our coverage is employer based. My understanding is if you have a private policy, you may be able to.
-We were able to claim hotels for transfer trips (IRS limited to $50/night) as well as food when we were out of town.
-We wanted proof of payment in case of audit. For our major services we had throughout the year, we called providers and asked for statements of 2014. It was surprisingly easy. W.algreens required us to show ID and come in person. Everyone else faxed or mailed with minimum hassle.
-We did not claim anything adoption related such as homestudy or ODAs (open donor agreement). There were random things we found we could claim such as pregnancy tests.
The issue with employer insurance is that the premiums are paid with pre tax dollars (Premium amount you pay is deducted from your gross pay to calculate your taxable income for your w2. Deducting it on your taxes would amount to deducting the same expense twice). A scenario where that would not be the case would be hard to come up with. A policy purchased privately would probably be paid with after tax dollars.
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