Taxing Time

Another blog for today, a bonus blog. Two for the price of one! Ah, the blog is free. My gift to humanity. The adoring masses. The Google Chromebook is working better for blogging. I just have to hit the keys harder and cleanly to not have typos. 

Yesterday, the online Tax Preparation program I use was offering a discount if I filed before today. I don't do tasks involving money on Sunday if  possible like paying bills besides like eating out or something where I trade a lesser rest (paying a bill) for a greater rest (having someone else prepare a meal for me).   

I suppose that it evens out the traffic on its website if there is not a mad rush at the end towards April 15. My reptile brain didn't want to do it. Who has  heard of a reptile paying taxes anyway. I suppose that customer support does not get taxed either if 95% of the users are not attempting to resolve issues on April 14th 11:55 PM. So, they got me as an early bird to bite now.  

So, I bit the bullet worm and got to work. I have learned to not presume upon tomorrow as I am banking on an unknown. Even today can be uncertain. One of the big problems about procrastination is presuming time will be available tomorrow. But, we don't know that. The unexpected can strike at any time. Then, a crisis can ensue because we didn't expect to have to deal with both this and that. Multi-tasking is a fact of life but additional tasks that could have been done yesterday are a debt that now has to be paid with interest.

It is not virtuous that I don't delay. I just hate pain I could have avoided. I like myself enough to not place myself in a stressful scenario that could and should have been resolved. As it turned out, I had issue with my return that took about two hours to figure out. I really had to look at my federal tax return closely on  a granular level to resolve the conflict.

In the middle of attempting to figure out what the problem was, I even considered contacting my accountant who had done my taxes for a decade or more until last year as I was getting weary of having to send him multiple emails just to get him to respond. I get it, he's busy. It's tax time. I just got tired of having  to manage the process as the customer and figured that doing it on my own could save time and money as he charged quite a bit more than the online program. Then, COVID hit and things got even more complicated. So, I just did my taxes for the first time ever last year and it went off without hitch. I used to  have a much more complicated income profile previously. Now it is fairly linear.

Yesterday, I ultimately figured out what to do on my own. I had to manually correct an issue on the software side. I contemplated if I had waited until April to file I probably would have panicked and paid the accountant to straighten it all out which then would have been his fee plus the sunk costs of the online program. And, he may have declined the work. Then, I'd been screwed. 

As it was yesterday, I resisted the itch to bail and forced myself to figure it out. When I thought about passing the ball to the accountant I considered how complicated that would be and surmised that I had to stick with it. But, I had the time to do it. The wall that my back could have been up against was still six weeks away. So, I took a deep breath and resumed my efforts.