Every year around April 16, I take the same vow. Next year, I will become as obsessed with record-keeping as I am with turning off the stove.
I will enter expenses as I go – into some sort of spreadsheet that calculates it all in neat little deductible categories. I will record every non-reimbursed prescription and every non-cash donation I’ve hauled to Goodwill, assign it a reasonable value, and record the address of the donation center, complete with zip code.
I will become that person my mother said never has a messy house “because she picks up and cleans as she goes.”
And I will notbe that person an accountant friend once called one of “the great unwashed.”
“They come to me with their shoeboxes,” he moaned, “and say, ‘Here you go. Figure it out.’”
There are just a couple of problems with my resolution.
By the time I make it, we are already more than a quarter into the next tax year. By then, I’m so over the process of picking through records and receipts that I can’t bear another evening – even in front of Grace and Frankie– getting up to date.
Plus, I ask myself, isn’t it better to do a boring task all in one big lump than extend the agony by making myself do it all year? There’s definitely something to be said for pulling the Band-Aid off fast rather than feeling every hairy receipt as it’s extracted.
Besides, this past year, with so much hoopla about the new “simplified” tax law and its big standard deduction, I talked myself into the fact that I probably wouldn’t need the information anyway.
I should have probably mentioned this to my tax preparer awhile back – like maybe at the end of 2017 when the law was passed. Instead, I just brought it up the other day.
“Oh, no.” he said. “We should definitely run a comparison.” Tax preparers can be such wet blankets.
To his credit, he had probably mentioned this in one of the numerous “letters, blogs and email blasts” his office says it sent “throughout the year in an effort to better inform you.”
I do not doubt it. There is always a raft of instructions and bright ideas. I should have probably assumed that with a new law in place, he would have gone into overdrive with these – he did – and I should have read each one with rapt attention.
I could keep beating myself up over procrastinating and ignoring them, but instead I’ve decided to take the kinder approach that a H&R Block tax expert has offered. He says people are either “task-driven” or “deadline-driven” –no judgment unless you don’t file at all. With apologies to Stephen Covey, I am apparently in the latter, urgency-seeking category, which means I’ll get ‘er done, even if it takes all night.
So here we are. And I am left to invoke the oft-stated wisdom of my late husband Bob: It is what it is.
And what it isat this moment is a large pile in need of a large table and several bars of carefully chosen chocolate.
Which leads me first to the most perplexing question of all. Milk chocolate with “cherry and red wine notes”? Or dark, with sea salt, orange or raspberries?
Maybe all of the above.
Copyright 2019 Pat Snyder
