Taxes! I need to do taxes! I do my own; from scratch. I have been for about 5 years now. A few years back, because of all of our inputs & outputs (401ks, jobs changes, kids, our house & refinances), i finally went a couple of years ago and hired an accountant to review my prior year’s taxes just to be sure I’d done them right. Despite baby literally in my arm, he practically offered me a job… So i took that as assertion that I was doing things correctly, and he made clear that I’d even caught a lot of the little things that people often overlook even when using platforms like TurboTax.
Doing my own taxes, takes a lot of work & a lot of reading, but it’s actually a good (even if borderline non-productive or zero-true-net-gain) task to have. When you understand how taxes work, you can prepare for things and make decisions based on what you know, but even still, this is a net-good-use of no one’s time. In fact, it’s amazing that not only do we pay taxed, but then we are at risk if we don’t pay someone to file our taxes and then we often have to pay to file them, all of which generates more exchange of currency resulting in more taxes, thus paying taxes costs more taxes. Don’t get me started on the credit & refunds.
It is my opinion, that you are almost always better off owing a little bit than getting a refund–that’s within a certain amount, because if you go too far over, you can actually owe on not paying enough throughout the year. In ordinary terms, however, if you owe, and you’re prepared for that expense, then that is actually overall more cost-effective for both you and every other taxpayer than it is getting a refund. I mean, don’t get me wrong, getting a few bucks back at the end of the tax year seems great at the time, but…
That money was always yours! You just allowed Uncle Sam to ‘hang on’ to it for you, which allowed them to earn interest on your dollar into their own pocket; invest it & keep the proceeds of all those investments you’d love to put a little bit into if you had a little extra cash.
I mean, wouldn’t it be nice if you hadn’t leant your hard earned dollars to the government and instead, you got to earn that interest or make those investments–albeit, you’ll pay taxes on those earnings, so they’ll still get 10-40% (win-win for them) of your earnings, but you’ll get to keep 60-90% of those instead of $0.
Imagine paying your taxes with some of the earnings you made because you didn’t over contribute!
Not to mention, how much did it cost *you to pay those taxed ahead of time? This is harder to think through, but it takes time & money to process all of that, and then more time & money to give it back to you, thus indirectly resulting in less of a payment overall.
The goal for taxes is to owe zero, but if you must get a refund or pay, choose to pay. Take the opportunity to invest what you would have paid, and then pay when you must.
All that said, I am not a financial advisor nor a financial expert and this was not financial advice. It was simply food for thought. It’s actually kind of unbelievable how much the government makes from–not taxes–but from you and every other taxpayer on simply filing & paying your taxes. This goes down to the company you work for, because they have to pay accounts or use time (and typically a lot of both) to file. All of this leaves less money in your pocket.
I file my taxes as honestly and ethically as I can. I have never sought out unethical or borderline loopholes nor have I ever fudged my numbers to cheat. Taxes are and will always be, so it’s best to just be honest. Nonetheless, don’t give your money away early just so that you can get a return at a higher cost to yourself and all other taxpayers as well as lose out on the opportunity to turn that money into more. ‘They’ say, that allowing money to sit still in cash or even in a savings account these days is the worst decision for your money, but the truth is that getting a refund from the government is probably the absolute worst way to use your money. When you go that route (and yes, I have recalled being ecstatic on a nice big return myself), you are not only losing out on the granted pitiful 0.5% APY interest rates of a savings account, but you’re losing any earnings on top of that, because it’s compounding.
Ok with all that said, I’m not telling my reader anything he doesn’t already know, so moving on…
Today was rough, but not in the normal context. When i woke at 630AM, it was still dark–a storm was over us making it hard to get natural sunlight to awaken. I struggled to get out of bed, and when I finally did, I made sure the boys were safe, and then laid down on the couch next to them to rest for 5 minutes. It was probably 25-30 minutes later, that Leo found me and started poking me.
The whole morning I was in a super rutt after this. I was able to get to working on trello for the most part–and even still on time–but I was struggling to be productive. Standup was exciting though! We have a new apprentice!
I hope I can help him and I imagine he’ll be able to help me. I don’t think I’ve realized this whole time how much I’ve missed having an ‘equal’–someone at my learning level. Further, he is someone who I can hopefully help! I have always loved teaching and helping those who are new to an experience I’ve already been through. It’s good for everyone as he has an additional resource, and for me, well teaching is the best way to master something, so anything I can help him with will be an opportunity for me to fortify my knowledge or even learn something new.
Anyway, once I did get going, i made, well I thought it was decent progress on Trello until I just thought about it, and I kind of have the room ‘linked’ in a trello way, but because of the user flow now, which changed last week, I won’t be able to link on the poker side until I create the trello-post handler, because in order to link on the poker side, I need to have the token and nothing is sending that through now and our server won’t allow posts from any client without the right credentials.
But yikes, maps in js are the worst! In fact, everything in js is just , well it makes no sense. I call functions that require arguments that are fed to them out of thin air–something about the promise, but that makes you have to really watch your .this’s & returns.