Taxed by Taxes

A few weeks ago on the day I planned to prepare my taxes, Heather Parker, posted something on Instagram about how changing "have to" to "get to" regarding one's tasks makes the task more palatable. It reminded me that I often try to do that or something similar. I take a dreaded task and try to find something positive about doing it. So I said aloud to myself "I get to prepare my taxes." Then when that felt really weird, I posted my attempt and my internal response as a comment on her post with a touch of humor.

Like most people I dread doing taxes every year. It's so time consuming and so fraught with the possibility of making some tiny mistake that will come back to haunt me. I used to take my taxes to an accountant, but several years ago I decided to give TurboTax a try. Using what I'd learned from using the accountant, I figured it out. It wasn't much more difficult than filling out the form she sent me every year, so I've prepared my taxes using TurboTax ever since. It saves me both time and money.

We turn taxes into a horrible experience, and we all buy into it collectively. But, really we don't pay taxes once a year. We pay them with every single paycheck. What we pay in April is what we were short for the previous year. This is where and the dividends we earned and the stocks we sold get taxed if we're lucky enough to own stocks. This is where I pay taxes on my business income or get deductions for my business losses. This is where we make up that difference in the math. It's also when we face the "big bill", the one that has to all come out at once. It's rare to hear people complaining throughout the year about taxes even though we pay them all year long.

My taxes are both complicated and simple depending on the year and what occurred during the year. I've learned the best thing to do is to pay attention all year long to figure out what I might be facing come tax time. That said, I also have a tendency to reach January and realize I need to spend some time taking care of financial record keeping from the previous year that I missed or that I forgot about or this or that or the other before I can file.

I would guess many people can relate to that in one way or another.

Every year I promise myself that tax preparation won't be so taxing for me, but it always is. Sometimes I wonder how much of that has to do my attitude and how much of that has to do with the process itself. I also wonder how much of that has to do with the attitude toward taxes in the United States.

The idea that paying taxes is bad is pervasive, and everyone works to get out of it. I wonder though how many of us would be willing to forego the things that taxes actually pay for. It's easy to point the finger at things we don't like, such as government waste, as reasons we don't want to pay taxes, but in reality, without taxes, we don't have a country. Taxes allow us to have highways, bridges, air travel, clean water and clean air (in theory), get an education, start a business, have a military, have law enforcement, have a safety net, and have a government. Taxes provide all these things and more yet we all resist paying them.

Sometimes I wish we could all allocate where our tax dollars went. But, of course, that would likely be far too complicated to implement, but imagine for a minute if when paying our taxes we had a way to tell the government what our budget priorities are. I think we'd see a different set of priorities coming from our government. That would truly be voting with our dollars.

This year I'm determined to keep my records up-to-date, to watch for anomalies that might affect what I owe next April, and to be diligent about my finances. But then again, I say that every year. Maybe this year will be the year I pull it off...

Maybe next year, I won't find preparing taxes quite so taxing... Maybe I'll even be able to say "I get to do my taxes" without rolling my eyes... Here's to dreaming!!