This is probably a silly question, in that I'm missing something obvious, but I'm trying to estimate my 2002 federal and state taxes, and I'm having a problem. I'll be itemizing both, and state taxes are deductible on a federal return, while federal taxes are deductible on my state return.

So I need to know how much I'll owe in federal taxes to estimate my state taxes, but in order to estimate my state taxes, I need to know how much I'll owe in federal taxes. I never ran into this before, because New York has a high enough standard deduction that I didn't have to worry about itemizing until I bought a condo this year.

As I said, I think I'm missing something obvious here, but right now, all I can think of doing is pretending I take the standard deduction for both, figure out what that gives me in taxes, recalculate taxes based on that amount, and continue until both numbers stay constant. That seems both tedious and prone to error, so I was hoping someone else would be able to suggest a better way to do things.

Thanks.