by Chris | Sep 26, 2015 | My Financial Journey
It’s been a busy summer. I’ve been away from home for most of the last 5 months, which is great (yay work), but it’s really good to be home… well… mostly.
The thing about home is that it doesn’t take long for all kinds of stuff to start piling up.
It’s simpler on the road. You do your job. You call your family (including the friends that make the ‘family’ cut). It’s a more focused kind of existence.
But when I’m home it’s a cornucopia of things. And they’re good things: friends, family, work. But all of a sudden I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed and I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere.
I’ve been here before… it is (shockingly) not my first time feeling overwhelmed… and usually I play a game called: Get the Crazy Out. Or in not-crazy-person terms, I make a list.
A list. Always helpful right?
Well… kind of. Sometimes it’s helpful to see it all laid out in front of you. Then you can make a plan to tackle it. Plans are good. They generally lead to some kind of action. But sometimes when you lay it all out it just makes it more impossibly insane.
That was this week.
My list is stupid, and the more I kept working on it the more insane it got. I might as well have added cure cancer, and find Amelia Erhart to the list because there’s just as much chance of that happening as most of the stuff on this stupid list. (more…)
by Chris | Sep 19, 2015 | My Financial Journey, Taxes
I’m not the most organized dude.
Actually, I wouldn’t really qualify myself as a dude… so that sentence is just chock full of words that don’t apply to me.
But as much as I’ve changed and gotten better over the last few years, one of the things that hasn’t improved is the way that I deal with receipts.
Regular readers are already sick of me talking about how important it is to keep any receipt that you plan on DEDUCTING on your tax return. If you haven’t heard it here’s the short version: it’s gotta be a receipt, and you’ve gotta keep it.
That piece of information has sunk into my brain, but it kind of has swung over to the extreme now.
I keep all the receipts.
Doesn’t matter if it’s business or if it’s the most pleasurable of pleasures. If I don’t ask for a receipt I get this kind of guilty kid feeling… like when I don’t want to brush my teeth before bed because I’m too lazy to go downstairs (even though I have significant DENTAL ISSUES).
So I keep them all. And at the end of the day I’m left with piles of unsorted receipts, most of them ones that I didn’t need to keep in the first place. All of which I have to sort through.
It’s part of the reason why tax time is a complete disaster in my house. I have to sort through the massive wads (because piles of receipts always form into wads) and figure out what was actually business, and what wasn’t… it’s really not a great system. Actually… it’s not really a system at all.
The Plan for Victory:
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