Well, it's Thursday, and about a month before my end-of-stripping due date. I'm so broke.
So, to take stock of this week. I tore apart the closet and put the vast majority of my clothes in storage, leaving out a few that I plan to take to the gypsy wagon.
I started writing a new book yesterday. More of a pamphlet, really. Anyway, I plan to publish it as an ebook and use it as an experimental how-to-sell-books-online kind of book. It shouldn't take much time to write.
Yesterday, still frustrated in my never-ending quest for the perfect purse, I broke down and sewed one. I'm still getting used to it (every purse has a breaking in period) but so far I like it well enough. I think I should have sewn some cardboard into the lining to make it a little firmer, but as it is it's nice enough.
The living room is full of boxes. And I need to work tonight because it's the first and the rent is due. It will be the last time I have to pay rent, though, so that's exciting.
Less exciting is the fact that I still have to pay last years taxes and the taxes from the year before that. And I need to find a new tax preparer because the lady who did mine last year charged me over $500 to do my taxes. That's almost half as much as I owed in taxes to begin with. So, yeah. I'm pretty sure I got ripped off that time.
It's amazing how many people will try to rip me off once they find out what I do for a living. I'm pretty sure this year I won't say. I'll just tell whoever's doing my taxes that I'm self-employed and I have zero business expenses and my only deduction is the 500 freaking dollars I spent having my taxes done last year.
I'm tired of being broke. I'm really, really tired of taxes. It wasn't such a huge deal when I was employed like everybody else. You take the form. You fill out the form. You do a little math. You're done. Now, I'm technically self-employed and there are so many freaking pieces of paper I'm supposed to be accountable for.
I feel very helpless at tax time. There's more information than I know how to compute so I'm at the mercy of someone else to put it all together for me. Then I have to pay out lots of money that I don't have on hand because I only ever seem to earn enough to live off of. And then, if for whatever reasons the government decides there was something wrong with all the math and paperwork which I had hardly any control over to begin with, they'll send me threatening letters and harass me to give them yet more money.
Furthermore, no one seems to understand this conundrum because they only have to fill out W2s. So every year everyone else is asking me why I never get money back, and I'm always explaining to them that my taxes are very different. Instead of getting money back, I'm expected to somehow raise several hundred dollars which I then give directly to the government. And that number changes from year to year. One year it was $4,000. Another it was only $800. Everyone says there must have been a paperwork error on the $4,000, but is the IRS ever going to give me that money back? Sure as hell they're not.
More likely than not, they'll notice that discrepancy someday and assume that I'm just lying about how much money I earn, and rain hell down on me while I huddle in my little trailer and wonder where the heck I'm supposed to get yet more money to give the government.
So there. That's my rant on taxes. I'd be so freaking happy if they just simplified it all down. You earn X which means you pay Z% of X. So much better than getting calls from my freaking accountant. "Now are you sure you didn't use your phone at all to contact your customers or place of business, because we could deduct that for you." For the billionth time, no! Don't you people charge by the hour? Stop asking me this.
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