Posted on 5 Comments

It’s complicated

I have to admit, I am getting a bit of pleasure out of this stage of my tax preparation… Because we have our own businesses, taxes at the Clarke house are not particularly simple.  We need to declare use of part of our home as a home office, and because of that, we need to keep track of everything we spend in the care and maintenance of this house.

I have a handy spreadsheet I’ve created for just such a thing, but I was very VERY bad about keeping it up to date in 2011.  (read: I didn’t do it at all).  So these last few days, I have spent poring over every last business and personal bank and credit card statement we have, and filling in all of those empty spreadsheet cells.  The fuller that spreadsheet gets the more excited I am to identify trends in our spending!

My inner nerd is showing.

Four more months worth of statements to go, and then I will have to resist the temptation to play with statistics, and get started on the actual tax return. Boo. Boring.

The good news is that I have been keeping the 2012 financial spreadsheet up to date since January, so there will be none of this week-long statement-fest next year. I’ll be all prepared. And I can watch the trends as they happen (and hopefully adjust some of the more out-of-control budget items along the way… “Dining Out,” I’m looking at you!)

My love of numbers, but my dislike of boring things makes my relationship with income taxes rather complicated. How about you? Love doing ’em, hate ’em, or somewhere in the middle?

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Posted on 5 Comments

5 thoughts on “It’s complicated

  1. I just consider ours one of those necessary chores — I don’t look forward to it, but I don’t hate it either; it’s just something that has to be done. Since we don’t have our own businesses, it’s pretty much just W-2s, bank interest, and the mortgage deduction.

    I used to hate tax time back before we bought the house — two decent incomes, no kids, and no mortgage is one of the worst tax situations to be in, and we had to pay ever since we got married thanks to the marriage penalty, until we were able to start deducting the mortgage interest.

    Of course, I did our taxes about two months ago. I always do them as soon as we get all the forms, just to get it over with. If we get a refund, this means it comes sooner…though if we have to pay, I make sure we don’t pay until we have to!

    1. I don’t do well with those “necessary chores.” One look at my kitchen sink, or the laundry pile in my bedroom will confirm that 🙂

  2. Yes, I have a love/hate relationship with doing our taxes also. It was fun to read your thoughts on the matter as they are very similar to mine. So I guess I have an inner nerd too. lol I complain that I have to do our taxes but deep down I love working with the numbers. As a matter of fact, if I find I need to do an excel worksheet to help me work on our spending trends, then hooray! This year I had to do 8 tax returns (3 for my teenage son and 5 for us because we moved to another state) And then, of course, I made a new excel chart to track it all………..yipee! By the way, love your blog.

    1. Eight returns? Holy cow! I think I’d lose my mind. And yet… all those numbers are kinda fun. I always thought statistics would be boring, but they are actually pretty interesting when they directly relate to you, aren’t they? Thanks for the complement – glad you chimed in!

  3. […] Last year at this time, in the context of doing taxes and spending nearly an entire week populating all of the months of 2011 in my financial spreadsheet, I said this: […]

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