One of the special joys of being a freelance writer comes at tax time. Tax forms are never fun to deal with at the best of times. What the "best time" is, I have no idea. I've never known anyone to approach a return with a smile on their lips and a song in their hearts–even people who get paid to do it for a living. For me it's especially unfun. For filing purposes, I have to register as a business even though the entire commercial empire consists of me, a desk and the computer. This means that filling out the returns is something of a nightmare because I have to go through the same hoops as the corner cheese shop and Boeing. I never have the slightest notion of which forms I need or what documents I have to have to go with them. This means that I spend hours downloading pdf files, going over complicated instructions, trying to log on to sites that seem to have a personal grudge against me, talking to help desk types who mentally pigeon hole me with the guy who sells pencils out of a tin cup, and then ending up at a dead end because I need to enter a code number that nobody sent me in the first placeI actually only need to fill in two lines of the gigantic, complicated documents (Yes, I made money. No, I'm not getting a bit of Obama's trillion dollar feather bed), but wading through the lines to find the relevant boxes is like some surreal journey. "Royalties" I understand. I also get "Service and Other Activities". I even understand "Gambling Income". It's when I turn the page and face a "Syrup Tax" and and "Renewable Energy System Credit" that I get truly lost. Then I come across "Cigar Tax" and I start thinking that I should bury my Rosa Cubas in the back garden just to be on the safe side. Shortly after that, I reach this stage:
Then I give up and let the wife do the returns.
2 comments:
I always look upon each impending Taxgiving Day with dread and annoyance. Being in sales has caused me to maintain a growing file box filled with all sorts of receipts and expense ledgers, usually none of which are allowable. I'd love to deduct them all but I'm not even being considered for a Cabinet post.
I can't help but think that it would be so much nicer to just pay my taxes when I buy things at Walmart and not have this intrusive interface with the government once a year.
I've heard a few arguments against a sales tax, but it would certainly take that stomach gurgling reaction away from us all that we get when any correspondence arrives in the mail box with the return address "Dept of the Treasury, Internal Revenue Service" on it.
I didn't think it was a coincidence that "IRS" was also the acronym for "Information Retrieval Service"
Freelance writers do have some tax-time joys compared to other Schedule C filers -- more of our expenses are deductible. I can take a home office deduction as a writer that I couldn't qualify for as a software developer. Eases the pain a bit.
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