Taxes Can Be Easy

I’ll always say that we can get more mileage out of taking a foot off the brake than we can in pressing harder on the gas. Whatever annoys you the most, wherever you find your biggest pain point, work on reducing or eliminating it. That’s how you get to Easy World. For some reason, taxes seem to be high on the list of universal annoyances. It doesn’t have to feel that way.

There are two reasons that taxes seem to bother people: the fact that we have to pay them, and the effort involved in doing the work. I’ll offer some perspective on both.

If it weren’t taxes, it would be something else. In Ancient Rome, people were expected to personally maintain the pavement of the road in front of their house. As far as I’m concerned, paying taxes is a sweat-free, comparatively easy and low-maintenance way to participate in an advanced society.

Oh, you want to argue about that? Big hair, don’t care.

What I’m talking about here is *my* perspective. From where I sit, I simply don’t give a care about taxes. The only times I’ve cared are the two occasions when I was erroneously assessed taxes for income that I didn’t actually earn. I would enjoy writing checks that large if I had the earnings to match! I found that the IRS has terrific customer service, and I wouldn’t necessarily mind if I ever had to talk to them on the phone again.

We pay more in taxes now than I used to earn. A LOT more. If it keeps going at this rate, which I hope it does, then we’ll eventually pay more in taxes than I earned at my highest-grossing day job. I look forward to the day when I have a ten million dollar tax bill. Come at me! C’monnnn, taxes!

Big money equals big money problems. Only, it doesn’t have to be a problem.

I choose to see all my bills, including my tax bill, as manifestations of abundance. My rent would make you cry, but dolphins are my near neighbors. On the other hand, I don’t have a car payment because I don’t have a car, and my utility bills are small because I live in a studio apartment. On yet another hand, my phone bill is atrocious because I have a billionaire phone.

That tickles me. It tickles me that I have the same phone I would buy as a billionaire. It also tickles me that we do our taxes at the beginning of every spring, again just like billionaires.

I could choose to continue to let money bother me and stress me out. I used to. I used to cry myself to sleep at night, thinking there was no way out and it would always be that bad. I cried the first time I did my own taxes. I misread the tax tables and thought I was paying on my gross, rather than taxable income. I called my mom, sobbing because I “owed” thousands of dollars I didn’t have. “That can’t be right,” she said, and because she is an accountant she offered to look over my work. Imagine my surprise and delight when it turned out, forty-five minutes later, that I was actually getting... a refund! That’s the feeling of lightness and joy that we can all feel when we think about money.

Money is nothing more nor less than a convenient way of storing and transferring energy.

I cried when I was in debt. It was dreadful. Then I determined that I would be debt-free before I pass from this world, and if I did nothing else, at least I’d be able to pay for my own funeral. (Shortcut: I am a whole-body donor and those expenses are included). I put my head down and hustled. I checked my accounts every day, I focused, I earned side income every chance I got, I read library books and worked on domestic contentment, and I got free. I sawed the shackle of consumer debt off my ankle. Now the other side, the student loan side, is nearly free as well. Soon I’ll walk tall, walking the walk of perfect financial freedom. That’s something we all can have, with a little focus.

Part of why taxes are easy for us is that our lives are unencumbered. We don’t owe back taxes; neither my husband nor I ever have. We don’t own a house. The complications mostly come from me and my weird ways of earning money, from royalties and dividends rather than a salary. We take the standard deduction because we don’t have enough reasons to itemize. We just get the software, and my hubby spends not quite an hour clicking through. We have our refunds direct-deposited and we’ve usually already put them in our IRAs before our friends have even bothered filing.

If you need and want to Get Organized with your taxes, set it up now so that you can make it easier for yourself for next year.

1. Choose a place to keep your tax papers. Duh, obviously. The trick is to figure out how to NOT HIDE IT FROM YOURSELF. Decorate your folder or box in a very bright and vivid way. We have a fireproof safe, about $120 from Harbor Freight, and all our financial things go into that. Alternately, you can use something metallic or sparkly or neon or fabric-covered, something with a giant arrow attached to it, something that pleases you. Then write up a description of where it is and put it in a file on your computer. If you know how to do a search, that should make it easy. “The tax documents are on the office closet shelf” or “the tax documents are in the wooden box in the credenza” or “the tax documents are in the red folder in the bookshelf next to the atlas” or whatever makes sense in your house.
2. Choose a place to keep your electronic tax records. I have a folder for my tax-related email. I forward them to my hubby, because he claims to actively enjoy doing the taxes, and then I archive my own copy.
3. If you save receipts, take a few minutes to think hard about which receipts you really need to keep, and which ones you don’t. Decide today that you are going to try a different approach this year. This time, you’re going to pause and ask yourself whether it’s okay to throw away or shred each receipt when it first lands in your hand. Most of your expenses probably can’t be claimed or deducted, and there’s no point cluttering up your home and vehicle and daily bag with them. Once you make a top-level policy decision, it only takes a second or two to say “keep or shred?” You can save yourself many hours of headache and heartache by excluding more papers and saving fewer.

How would it feel if you loved money and you found that every financial process in your life was hilarious and simple? What if doing taxes made you want to do a happy dance? What if doing your taxes made you want to rush down the sidewalk, skipping, flinging flower petals in the air and hugging the mail carrier?

Or what if, you know, what if it just wasn’t all that hard?

Today is the day. Today is the day that you can transform your feelings about taxes. If you so choose, you can dial up a different emotional reaction. What is it going to be? Easy, I hope.