Monday, February 28, 2011

Many happy returns

Where does the time go?

Seems like only yesterday I was asking my accountant to take enough deductions on my tax returns to walk me right up to the jailhouse door, but not actually take me inside.

Every year I promise myself I'll be better at keeping records, receipts and my story straight when it comes to tax deductions. And every year, I just throw everything in an extremely well organized file, then pull it all together about a week before I go see my tax guy.

I suppose by that measure I'm ahead of the game, since I'm already thinking about it and I'm not having my taxes done until the end of March.

Lots of well-meaning friends (aren't they all?) have told me to use Quicken or Excel to keep track of my expenses. Then when this time of year rears its ugly head, I could just press a key and print out everything all neatly categorized. The problem is to do that would require the discipline of inputting all the information on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

That's just crazy talk.

Why do that when I can have a perfectly good time procrastinating until the last minute.

It's both a blessing and a curse that because I'm on the creative side in advertising, I can write off a great many things the average taxpayer can't. It just makes record-keeping that much more complex.

And by complex I mean work for me.

It's a good thing this blog doesn't make any money or I'd have to write it off.

Something I think a lot of people are doing already.

1 comment:

Melissa Maris said...

Excel is one of my greatest nemesises. (Yes, I had to look up the plural spelling of that. Thought it might have been nemesi.)

Good luck on T-Day.