Tax prep

My lingering, unfinished task at this time of year is tax prep. I, unlike everyone else in the world, find that doing my taxes is a less than desirable process. My solution is to have an accountant do my taxes. I've been doing this for about 24 years now. Even so, I still have to prepare all of the raw data. I try to get as much of it as possible in spreadsheet form, mostly to stay organzed, and then I can email the files to my accountant.

The main complexity for me is my business expenses while I was self-employed. After this year, I won't have that overhead to deal with, but this tax year (2006) I was self-employed for three months, out of work for six weeks, and fully employed for the rest of the year.

I also have the complexity of splitting my year between states. The state of Washington doesn't have a state income tax, but I worked my three months of self-employment in Colorado. I simply fill in my spreadsheet with dates and amounts and show where the income was earned, and my accountant handles the rest.

Actually, I just sent an email to my accountant "warning" her that my tax prep info was "coming soon."

I should really do the work this weekend to get it over with, but I find it too depressing to think about. I suspect I'll do a little, just to feel I made some progress.

What I usually find is that I keep putting it off until one day I wake up and simply feel inspired (really) to just get it all done in one sitting. Frequently it has taken four to eight hours to do it all, mostly sifting through receipts, looking for as many deductible expenses as I can find. Sure I could keep my info more organized with some fancy software, but over the course of a year that could cost me much more than those eight hours. I have enough data to be a annoying, but not enough to be worth a premium software solution.

-- Jack Krupansky