Tag: taxes

January 24, 2024 – It Is That Time of Year Again

January 24, 2024 /

it is not just the holidays, but the following months has it’s own dread. Because I am a little lazy, all of our bill statements tend to pile up over the year. However, it is this time of year that I choose to file, organize and shred. I do this because it is the beginning of preparation for tax season.

I am certainly not making excuses, I should do it more than once a year. One of the biggest reasons is that filing is inconvenient. Statements, receipts, etc. go into a drawer after they are dealt with. When the drawer is filled, the stack goes upstairs to a pile. That pile grows unchecked until this time of year.

When I sort, I group everything by debtor. Things that are one and done like invoices go directly to the shred pile if significant time has passed and there is no warranty. Each individual stack is organized oldest to newest so that it can be placed into the file and automatically be in order year over year.

Trust me, my recent tax filings have been no picnic. Owing over $10,000 a few years ago was not only a shock but also caused me to evaluate what and how I am doing things. Getting audited was trying for my spare time and my relationship. One of the things that I changed as a result of this was my use of a tax professional. I used to do all of my own returns but that caused so much strife between my marriage that I have finally resigned to pay someone.

Maybe you have never done your own taxes. Or maybe you have never paid for them to be done. Well, there is a dirty little secret if pay someone to do it and that is the majority of the work is gathering and organizing the data to prepare the tax returns. The truth is, preparers just plug in the data as provided. Their fee is for their time and the small amount of liability that they incur by doing so.

Now, my taxes aren’t exactly straight forward but they are not the most complicated. Over the years I have had rents and royalties, LLC and investment complications. So, I have to do things like gather all of my utility bills and sum them for the year so that I can calculate the percentage of the cost that the rental has on the overall bill for deduction purposes.

The simple truth is I have to do this work whether I do the taxes or I have someone else do them. It so happens that I am forced to get organized way earlier when I hand it off whereas I may drag my feet when I am doing it myself. As my filing goes, any bill that is not used in taxes gets evaluated as to how much folder space I have. It really serves no purpose to have five years of bills filed. But when the folder starts getting full, I start culling years past. Those papers all go to the shredding box.

Speaking of shredding, I also eliminate my eighth year of tax forms. This time of year is great because I can sit in front of the TV and shred while playoff football is on. It makes me feel like I can afford to spend the time watching while doing something useful at the same time.

Be prepared, it is amazing the volume of paper after shredding compared to before. It is not clear to me whether I can put it in the recycling bin or not. Sometimes I do but when they dump the bin, there is often a snowstorm of paper bits on the ground. I think the recyclers don’t like it because for that fact.

End Your Programming Routine: Part of why I dread this is it is a big job. It makes things much easier when everything has a place and it is in it. If you are not a consistent organizer, I highly recommend doing it this time of year because it really pays dividends for those other required things in life, like taxes.

April 15, 2022 – What Was Formerly Tax Day

April 15, 2022 /

For probably forty some years, this was a day marked on the calendar. It only changed if the 15th fell on a weekend and then it would be the next Monday without fail. Two years ago, we got an extra five months and then last year tax day was May 15. It appears very arbitrary to me, but this year it is April 18, not the fifteenth.

Don’t get me wrong, I am in no hurry to send my five figure bill to the government so that they can buy crack pipes or send arms to Ukraine. Why do we accept the status quo? If we had an ala carte or optional funding mechanism, how many of things the US government offers would you sign up for? I thought that it might be interesting to talk about ‘what ifs’ today.

  1. What if your neighbor came over to your house and demanded that you give them money to pay for his side action’s abortion, I mean health care? If you don’t give the money to your neighbor, he is going to take it from your bank account or other assets. Oh, and by the way, if you don’t tell him how much money you have, he may imprison you. At the very least, he will charge you more money as a penalty. This is a crime in any other setting but taxes.
  2. What if we valued cost of ownership more than having a new toy? When I think of redneck, I think of a lot of broken down shit. Before you think I am too harsh, I have been there as well. I bought a boat one time (and I would love to have another). At that time, I had two babies and the boat sat outside. I can honestly say that routine maintenance like oil changes were sometimes outside of my financial reach and so they got delayed. All infrastructure and programs have a cost to maintain and I do not see that cost factored into any project. It is assumed that once a project or program is completed, the cost of ownership is absorbed into the government for perpetuity.
  3. What if we were suspicious instead of punch drunk idiots? Every single campaign advertisement promises to ‘get stuff done’. What is that stuff you ask, well it is taking more money from you for things you (likely) don’t want and cant afford to take care of without taking more money. I honestly cannot name a single law that I want amended or clarified (read nearly free and makes life better). I can think of many that I would like to remove but when does this happen? Remember in 2016 with a Republican senate, house and president repealing the Healthcare mandate/tax, I don’t. How do we get oligarchs? We gerrymander the rules, laws and regulations to benefit the few that can afford to participate.
  4. What if James Monroe was president again, does anyone remember early American history anymore? For nearly 100 years the American foreign policy affectionately called the Monroe Doctrine was focused on items that only directly impacted us. Something needed to be happening in this hemisphere and this continent to warrant intervention. I am sorry Israel, Syria, Ukraine, South Korea, Taiwan, Serbia, Bosnia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Vietnam to name a few. Quite frankly, China’s foreign policy is a far more appropriate approach benefitting it’s citizens than is ours, stability is good for business.
  5. What if we actually believed in the Golden Rule? I remember talking about this before grade school. All of the social programs are a grotesque attempt to enforce something we should be doing anyway. But society can’t trust that I will be nice the the Z’s. Isn’t that the beauty of the concept? There is a saying that ‘morality cannot be legislated’ so why do we keep trying to do it? This is another form of me forcing my values and ethics on you. Let’s keep ‘getting more stuff done’.
  6. What if we didn’t have an FDA, USDA, HUD, Department of Education, Department of Energy or name your alphabet soup? Anybody have any idea what these entities do besides hand our money and create unnecessary regulation? These are all masking the fact that we don’t really believe capitalism is a viable solution and by the way let’s make some people rich along the way. If we are not willing to give money to a cause, then it is probably not market viable and probably doesn’t need to be done. I think that there is a collective belief that these organizations are doing this for our own good and that we are not capable of making intelligent decisions. ASTM and ISO are two non-governmental organizations that perform self policing. They perform in the very same function as USDA inspected meat do by audits and periodic monitoring.
  7. What if we were smart instead of educated? Contrary to popular opinion education is largely a waste of time. I want my kids smart enough to pursue education that is useful and not forced into indoctrination. Prisoners learn how to communicate through the plumbing or make a shiv out of a bedspring, that is learning . Learning is unstoppable but it needs the proper motivation. Education teaches compliance and obedience.

I want to finish off with a little more on seven. Suppose you were Galileo? First of all, the prevailing belief was that the universe revolved around the earth, it was a sin not to. He went to prison for his beliefs, which were provable by the way. Today he is celebrated because he was right. According to his life, he was enrolled at the University of Pisa at the age of 16 and chair of the mathematics department at 25.

To think that the best scientific minds in history were hindered because they fought the status quo of church and government or in fact that they didn’t have compulsory education is a testament to how wrong we are. The religion of climate change or critical race theory has a truth out there, it is going to take one martyr who is not going to come from within the system. The rest of us will be condemning that person until long after we are all dead.

Alright… my point here is that this is part of the mechanism that enacts and does all the things the I don’t want in my life. I probably should go into fractional reserve banking someday because taxes are not the activity that enables all of the nonsense. Taxes are the activity that build confidence for the rest of the dupes that this country is stable to invest in. That in turn creates the money for all of this in a nutshell.

End Your Programming Routine: I probably could have written for hours. I was going to write about the few things that I might be willing to put money into but then it kind of got off course and not clear enough so I deleted it. Since I haven’t railed on the government for some time, I let it fly today. As much as all of this bothers me, it also has very little impact on my day to day life, other than the continuous stealing that happens with my paycheck. Lest we all get too wrapped up in things we can’t control, moving on for the week.

“He has risen, indeed” Luke 24:34