I abhor that old, cynical cliche: “Nothing is certain but death and taxes.” Yet I can’t help but recite those words every year when it’s time to start preparing to file. While sitting on the floor in my home office, surrounded by paper clips, staples, rubber bands and files, I spread out piles of daunting papers all around me. It is as if I am “Monkey in the Middle” of a cruel, eternal game of Tax Prep. The truth is that the challenging part of filing taxes is not really in filling out the return. Rather it lies in rifling through and organizing stacks of files and papers to determine what you spent, what you earned and what you can deduct. I need to know where every little thing is, so that when my husband barks at me to find a specific document, I can easily locate it without, God forbid, delaying his momentum on Turbo Tax.
Tax software is so great these days, that you really don’t have to be an expert to get the return completed. Even so, you always get the feeling that your return is riddled with errors, and you never feel good about it when you’re done. It’s all part of the torture of filing, an American rite of passage.
It seems as though every time I prepare for taxes, I think about how quickly the year has flown by since the last time I prepared. It’s as if tax prep marks the beginning of a fresh new year, since we are more likely to recall the last time we did this universally despised task than what we did to celebrate the new year. Plus I can rejoice in the fact that I will not have to do this again for an entire year!
Combing through credit card statements I am reminded of the purchases we made throughout the year, cringing at the thought of things we could have certainly lived without – and just how much we could have saved had we not bought those items. Worse yet is the evidence of the increase in gas prices on the credit card statements since the start of last year. I scan the cell phone bills, which are at least 14 pages long each, and am eternally amazed at how many fees they can legally charge us. Yet I continue to just suck it up and use their services, year after year, chatting and texting away on an apparatus I could once easily live without. And are you kidding me? We pay that much for internet access and cable TV? That means every time I watch Chopped on the Food Network or my husband enjoys a Miami Heat game, we have paid several dollars for each view. I think to myself, year after year, “How can I cut expenses?” But invariably I get too overwhelmed to come up with a viable answer and just blow it off.
On a positive note, I stack up all the post office receipts from the many Lilly Badilly books I’ve mailed out to eager young readers. And I make a happy pile of cards and letters I received throughout the year from teachers and students, friends and family. But the impending doom of chaos that multiplies on my floor quickly brings me back to reality and that tax pit in my stomach. (It’s remarkably similar to that feeling I got before I had to do the prep for my colonoscopy.)
In the end, I make a neat tower of the well-organized papers. The garbage can is packed densely and the recycle bin is overflowing all over the floor. I make a neat tower of the well-organized papers I must keep, though will likely never look at again. I start to label them perfectly with Post It Notes using a Sharpie, but by the end of the pile, my writing gets so sloppy I can hardly read what I’ve written.
What comes next in my thought process are visions of how I will be getting rid of all these documents 7 years from now, and just how old they will seem to be to me then. I recall how I recently tried to destroy boxes of old tax papers by soaking them in garbage pails of water to dissolve them into unintelligible pulp. I highly do NOT recommend this, as the smelly mess of decomposed paper that ensued on my driveway after draining the water still leaves a mark, many months after the fact. What’s the alternative? There’s the home shredding machine that gets jammed every second time you pass papers through it. And Heaven help you, should you fail to remove a staple before putting your papers through the machine. You’ll be having a funeral service for your shredder for certain. Perhaps these are the reasons I let the boxes of past taxes stack high in my closets, collecting dust and grime for way too many years. One of these days, I vow to utilize a shredding service that pulls into the driveway and obliterates my records in front of my eyes.
But then the next year, the process starts over again, marking yet another faster-than-lightning year in my life. If it’s true that nothing is certain but death and taxes, I say bring on the taxes.
