safe!

One of my big worries lately has been finishing our taxes.

I don't know how this came to be my job, but I've done our taxes pretty much every year except for that brief period where we had to file in Illinois, Massachusetts and Georgia. (We were living in Illinois, hobbitt was working in Georgia, and he owned a small piece of the S-Corp of his employer, and that was the Massachusetts part.) I didn't have the smarts for that nonsense so we hired someone to do those.

Anyway, we no longer live in a state that has an income tax, so it behooves us to track our sales tax. I had a paper bag bursting with receipts that had been glaring at me for months. It actually made my heart sink to look at it.

So yesterday I took the plunge and plowed through the receipts, matching them to their transactions in Quicken. It took me almost three hours, and that concentration also led to Zach having an accident on the carpet. Good times!

Well, it was worth it. According to the tax tables, we'd have about $700 less for the sales tax deduction. It was enough to get us past owing anything and into a small refund situation. While this whole downsizing thing has been wonderful for our cash flow, it truly blows come tax time. I filed the return electronically and my nightmare is over for another year.

It totally earned me that big honking martini.