An Open Letter To Early Tax Filers
Dear “responsible” people who filed your taxes months ago:
How the heck do you do it??
This January, like EVERY January that came before it, I pledged to file my taxes early. I hoped this would be the year I stop speeding down the road, flying through yellow lights, praying I don’t pop a tire, anxious to mail my taxes before the post office closes in five minutes. This will be the year I dodge the risk of peering through the locked Post Office doors, envelope in hand, realizing with a sinking stomach that the IRS will slap me with a late penalty for my tardy postmark.
In fact, every January I vow that filing taxes will be my first act in the New Year! I’ll drink champagne, wear a sparkly hat, and bust out my 1099′s.
But alas, reality steps in. My W-2 doesn’t show up until February. I certainly can’t calculate my taxes without my W-2. I also freelance for a handful of publications and, as anyone who works in the publishing industry can attest, editors are lazy busy. My freelance tax forms (the 1099-MISC) don’t debut in my mailbox until March.
Then there are the requisite 1099-DIV forms, tracking my dividend payouts; the 1099-INT forms, tracking my interest income; the 1099-B forms, tracking the stocks I bought and sold. Forms pour from every brokerage house where I’ve stuffed some cash. And let me assure you: my cash is so spread out it would make a “lady of the night” blush.
My investments are scattered among so many brokerage houses and banks that they read like a guidebook to America’s financial institutions. I have a so-called good reason for choosing each one. Firm X offers the lowest stock-trading fees. Firm Y carries the highest savings interest rate. Firm Z sells one particular index fund I’ve been eyeing for months. Come tax season, all of these institutions are mailing me forms.
Each form trickles in, slowly, over the span of months, and summarily gets stuffed into a giant manila envelope without a cursory glance. When I eventually peer at the results, I’m astonished: Firm A paid me $21 in interest. Firm B says I earned $45 in stock profits. Firm C tells me I paid $2.50 in foreign taxes.
Each of these must be tallied. “Box 1a gets reported on Form 1040, line 9″ … heaven forbid I enter the wrong boxes’ tally on the wrong line. It would trigger a massive do-over.
A neighboring manila envelope holds a stack of receipts for my freelancing business. These also must be tallied and entered on Schedule SE, a self-employment form which helps me fill out Schedule C. Lather, rinse, repeat: when I’m done, I launch a second self-employment form for my other business.
I tabulate my health costs, my mileage, my contributions to tax-deferred accounts. Then I run a Google search for this year’s tax credits, find a few for which I qualify, and fill out those forms as well.
The process eats several hours. It’s boring. But it’s gratifying, in an odd sort of way. My taxes are complicated, but not SO complicated that I can’t do it myself. It’s a challenge. It’s a mystery. It’s an emblem of DIY culture.
And it’s not due until Monday. Monday at 5 p.m. when the post office closes, to be exact. So despite my promise to myself in January, I don’t actually start my taxes until Monday at noon.
It takes me four hours to finish my taxes, and another 45 minutes to rummage for an envelope, find my car keys, and honk in rush hour traffic while thinking “now I remember why I never drive anywhere at 5 pm on a weekday!” I screech my car to a halt outside the post office, clutching the envelope in my hand, at precisely 4:55 p.m. I’m shocked to see that I’m the only one there. Where is everyone? Are they all filing late? Or … have they really all filed early? Am I the only uber-procrastinator in town?
So dear responsible tax filers, those of you who processed your taxes months in advance: I hold you in high esteem. Although in the back of my mind, I suspect you e-filed at 11:59 p.m., taking advantage of the glorious 7-hour extension that e-filing brings. Which makes me truly the early bird.
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We get antsy in **January**, waiting for the random assorted temp, etc, jobs to send us the W-2′s. (We start looking for them right after Christmas.) We estimate how many little slips of paper (W-2′s) we should have. When each one arrives, we stick it/them all in one place with the bills. Every time we pay the bills, (presumably each week) we count how many W-2′s we have as if they are gold and we are dragons. (We usually get money back, not always, but usually.) When we’re pretty sure we have them all, we run to the nearest free tax prep place, as we make very little to speak of (by then it is early **February**.) Because the figuring and filing is then done (by someone else) early, we receive our refund fairly quickly, stick it in a savings account and allow our selves a celebratory dinner out. Whooo-hoo!! There are several keys to “Early”: The early “ant-siness”, keeping the W-2′s in one location, skipping worrying/perfection, i.e., if we don’t happen to get a W-2 before we file (does anyone care that we (may have) made $25 for one day’s worth of work at a temp job in mid-2010? Holy hell, I hope not. That is just ridiculous.) and having a tax preparer do it, not me.
If you only have one job, it’s even more streamlined, faster and easier! I used to do them myself, and run to the post office at midnight all stressed out. I gave up needing to prove that I could subtract line 23 from line 14 or whatever. I just don’t care.
I prefer to think of procrastination as a form of “sticking it to the man”. They make you file taxes, so why should you do it early?
I’m no early filer, but file electronically!
I figure all those people filing early are the ones getting money back. Me? I wait until the last possible moment to write that check with 4 digits (before the decimal point). I want to hang on to my money as long as I can!
I don’t follow early ever, but what are you doing filing by mail? and if your life is that difficult hire a CPA for a few hundred dollars – you may save that in just optimizing deductions.
@Evan — I file by mail because I do my taxes by hand (rather than by using software like TurboTax), and I can’t figure out how to e-file directly on the IRS website (without a private company intermediary). I know doing it by hand sounds crazy, but I prefer it because I feel like I learn a lot more about the tax code this way. I used to use programs, but now that I don’t I feel like my understanding of tax laws and tax deductions has improved substantially. That education, to me, is worth putting in a few extra hours.
I didn’t even get a schedule K-1 form for my grandfather’s estate until April 6th… I then have to feed that into a 1041 to generate another K-1 for my own taxes. I plugged everything into Turbotax last minute, estimated that I was within $50 of already paid one way or another, and mailed two extensions.
Now I just have to make sure I get this done before October 15th, and don’t wait until then to do it.
This will be the 2nd year doing my taxes on my own. My mother was a tax accountant and we did my taxes together every year for over a decade.