It’s April! Do You Know Where Your Taxes Are?

I had the absolute best day on Friday.  The thing is, I’ve been DREADING doing my taxes this year.  I mean DREADING!!  Every time I saw signs of spring/Easter/Turbo Tax at the store or on a commercial, I started to get anxiety.  Heart palpitations.  Is it really almost APRIL??  Is April 15th really almost upon me??  I was seriously having some major issues thinking that it was almost here.  The time of year I figure out how much money I still owe the government of these United States.  With my Sister’s encouragement I started to tackle them on Friday.  Guess what!  I don’t owe!!!  I’m not getting much of anything BACK, but I don’t have to pay this year FINALLY!  Here is a few things that we changed this year so that I could have that wonderfully fantastic day on Friday!

I wasn’t a 1099′d employee for a good portion of the year this time.  Most of my time living in Utah I have been an employee of a company.  I was technically considered a consultant, so taxes were not taken out of my monthly checks.  I was responsible for keeping track and making sure I had enough to cover the taxes at the end of the year.  I hate doing this.  I don’t want to guestimate how much money I’m going to owe.  I don’t want my entire savings account wiped out on April 15th every year.  Last year I got a standard job where regular old taxes were taken out of my check…. ahhhhh.  That felt better.  Also, I bumped my deductions down to zero, because with the amount of money I make with the blogging stuff I knew taking more out of my regular check was going to help even things out a bit.

I was finally keeping track of finances again!  Remember back about a year or so ago, when I confessed that we were so messed up on our finances I was choosing to ignore the income and outgo.  (Always.  always. ALWAYS a bad idea by the way).  So when April 15th rolled around last year I was guessing at a lot of deductions and missed a good portion of things I probably could have deducted.  This year though I flagged items as deductions as they came through my Quicken software.  This allowed me to make sure I catch every single thing I paid out for my businesses, which truthfully is much more than I realized!  Keeping good track of what can, in fact, be written off is a huge step in making sure you don’t owe.  Plus you won’t have to be searching through old bank statements and receipts trying to find them!  Believe me, soooo much harder to do after the fact.

So, if you are like me and cringing every time you see a Turbo Tax commercial, or an Easter display, hunker down and get it done!  You only have a couple weeks left, and it’s better to know NOW how much you are going to owe in 2 weeks.

For those lucky people getting a refund (or have already gotten it) are you planning on doing anything fun with it??