never forget there’s life after death and taxes

Every year that I can remember, I’ve filed my taxes the first week of March. Because why wouldn’t you want a fat refund as soon as possible?

This year, though, well, this year is the first year that I am filing as a self-employed person. A self-employed person who tells the truth—and nothing but the truth so help me God—on her taxes.

The problem with telling the truth on one’s taxes when one is a self-employed person is that one has not paid any taxes all year (if one is me)(one who is not me might be wiser). Taxes are expensive. Yowza.

So, when I went to file our taxes at the beginning of March as I usually do, I saw the amount payable and promptly dumped all our tax info in our black hole of a bedroom never to be seen or heard from again.

Until this morning.

April 30th is the tax deadline in Canada, and I am much too lazy to see if it is also the deadline anywhere else. April 30th is also the day we woke up to this:

Summer was here on Saturday. And now winter is back, and here to stay. Let’s just assume I wasn’t so chipper this morning. Not that I’m chipper any morning, but is spring after seven months of winter too much to ask?!

So this morning I took the two younger kids to Walmart to find the H&R Block booth to get our taxes done. We waited a bazillion years and finally got in. The guy started things up and when he got to my income and learned I was self-employed, well, he couldn’t do my taxes. Because maybe there should have been a sign about this sort of thing so I would not have had to wait with two little kids and I would not have had to cancel their appointments I’d booked for later that morning because I suck at planning ahead and budgeting my time?!

Oh! And this after I’d tried to get Noah to print the last couple receipts I needed, but his computer hated my external hard drive and the library wasn’t open for another hour and so we’d dropped in on my mother-in-law to finally get things printed. Not that the kids minded, they love visiting Miss Sue at work.

ANYWAY.

So I texted my father-in-law to see if he would like an interruption to his quiet day off so I could use his computer at his place because remember how Preston baptized mine?

Russ was all good with it but then suggested he could drop his laptop off with me if that worked better. It totally did, because Preston naps much better in his own bed and a napping toddler is much better for the whole tax-doing thing.

Three hours later I’d used every deduction I could come up with and still owed a bajillion dollars. I decided that waiting in line AGAIN at a tax place was a necessity. Apparently this whole self-employed thing is too complicated for me, because I just don’t see how I can make half what Noah does and have to pay three times the taxes.

We had booked my in-laws to have the kids for the afternoon/early evening anyway, so we canceled the appointment we had (we suck at making it to appointments, apparently) and instead went to sit at an H&R Block branch, this time one that knew what it was doing.

The first thing I did when we sat down at the dude’s desk, though, was make sure he could do small business taxes. He could. Or so I assumed before I started helping him with stuff and began to regret my decision to hire a “professional”.

Noah was even live-tweeting the event, nervous that I was going to strangle the guy.

But, this guy totally proved himself more than capable because he saved me about three grand and I nearly hugged him. I nearly threw up, though, when he handed us the bill, but it was totally worth every penny. And we paid him a crap-ton of pennies.

Two-and-a-half hours later we went to pick up the kids, who had already been fed dinner. There was even enough for us to have some, which was great, as I had not exactly planned what to feed the five of us.

The moral of the story? Be ye not so stupid as to wait till the last possible minute to file your taxes. And for heaven’s sake, find someone who knows what he’s doing if you find yourself completely incompetent and ready to sell your left kidney to be able to afford to pay the government.

*title credit: Relient K