Taxes Tornado

Wednesday April 15th, 2009 - Lake Villa, IL

Tax day. Again. And did I happen to file my return on time this year? Uh…no. Again. Damn. Why do I find myself in this situation? Again. This has been real mental block for me and I’m sick of it. Every year I say I’m going to stop farting around and get my taxes done before April 15th but every year I never do it. I don’t know if I’ve ever done it once.

Part of the problem is that a lot of the places I work throughout the year don’t send me a 1099 form by January 31st like they’re supposed to. That’s a pretty lame excuse though. If I kept better records I’d know exactly how much money I made and where I made it and it wouldn’t make a difference if the form was there or not. I just haven’t been able to do it.

Another part of the problem is I have too many other things going that I enjoy and taxes get pushed to the side. I don’t think I’m alone in not enjoying filing taxes but exactly how stupid can a guy get to think that doing the same thing every year will change the results? It won’t. I avoid it as long as I can and then rush to file at the last minute. That’s stupid.

I usually don’t owe much if at all and my biggest expense is paying my accountant to do it for me. I have a good relationship with him and I discovered him on my own so I’m not at the mercy of the infamous ‘friend of a friend’. That’s burned me very badly in the past.

There really is no excuse to keep doing this but I’m not going to make any half ass vow to not do it again next year because in all honesty I probably will. What would really help though is to keep on improving which is something I’ve been doing for quite a few years now. I am getting very good at keeping my receipts but organizing them is another story.

At least I’m keeping them though. I used to not even do that. Over the years I’ve gotten into the habit of saving every receipt and putting them all in a single container and then at least when I do attack them at tax time they’re in the same place. It’s a huge job to sort all of them into their separate piles but at least I have them in my possession to sort through.

Here’s an incoming call on the clue phone…WHY NOT SORT THEM OUT AS I PUT THEM IN THE CONTAINER ALL YEAR LONG? Gee, there’s a novel thought. What’s to stop me from doing exactly that now? Absolutely nothing, but I need to shut my mouth and DO it. I even bought a leather bound organizer last year but it’s been gathering dust.

I’m not going to beat myself up too badly because I know for a fact a lot of other people are way worse off than me. They haven’t filed in years and have no receipts at all to begin sorting through and they don’t even think about how they’re going to catch up on all of it. I was behind on filing for years but that’s ancient history. I’m getting a lot better at this.

I still could use major improvement though. The one good thing about struggling is that I won’t owe a huge wad like Sinbad apparently does. However he got in that mess is what I want to avoid. I feel bad for him but he had his chances to avoid that and I want to get a grip on my own situation before the real money starts flowing. This is a fixable problem.