Tax Time

We went back to the Tax Person today.

I used to do my own taxes. For a long time I did them by hand, which gradually got more and more complicated, and then I used TurboTax for a while until that got to be too much of a nuisance. When my mom died and we had to figure out the estate my brother just flat out told me “get someone else to do this” so we did and it was just the most wonderful thing ever. We showed up with a mountain of paperwork, spent an hour answering questions, and then … walked away. And someone else – someone who does this sort of thing for a living – took care of it.

We even got a refund, for the first time in over a decade. It was enough to cover a good chunk of the BFT23, in fact.

So yes, we were absolutely going to do this again this year.

They sent us the preliminary paperwork a few weeks ago and I got all four of us to sign in all of the places where we each individually needed to sign. I collected all of the various bits of paper (covered in numbers and acronyms, generally vertigo-inducing if you’re more of a word person than a number person) into folders according to type of paper. I declined to cancel the appointment – the paperwork had an opt-out appointment already set up, and I was good with that.

Last week the Tax Person went home sick about an hour before our appointment, which I am pretty sure had nothing to do with us but which did mean we had to reschedule.

Today was the day. Kim and I both found time to go, and we brought a slightly larger mountain of paperwork with us (all of this year’s and some of last year’s in case the Tax Person needed it, which turned out not to be so). We answered a bunch of questions. The Tax Person complimented me on my folders.

There will be no refund this year, which is kind of what we were expecting. Last year’s was an artifact of having way too much withheld from some of the things I inherited from my mom plus having two kids in college versus only one this year so that credit got cut in half this time around. But the bill will be rather minimal, and that’s fine. The goal is always to come close to the target – not too big of a bill (which can be tricky to fund all at once) or too big of a refund (which means that someone other than us has been earning interest money on our money), and we hit that sweet spot.

There will be some number crunching for an exact amount and then I will have to go back to do some Settling of Accounts before it all gets sent off to wherever it needs to be sent off, but it is now out of my hands and for that I am grateful.

I don’t enjoy paying taxes. Nobody does. But I’m a rational and mature adult so I know that they’re necessary. They pay for the services and infrastructure that we need, and there is such a thing as “enlightened self-interest” which understands that sometimes you have to sacrifice a bit up front to get greater returns back later. In an age that celebrates pure undistilled toddler-level greed this counts as a revelation to many people but so it goes.

I celebrated by going back to work and figuring out which students I needed to send graduation reminders to, because that’s the kind of wild man I am.

But I’m glad to have handed this job over to someone else, I’m glad it’s mostly done, and I will be happy to meet with the Tax Person next year.