By: Revanche

Tax Planning in September

September 5, 2008

It’s not anything so nuts as actually running the numbers, precisely. Sort of. I just decided that in the spirit of getting ready to pick up and fly where the winds may take me (am I mixing my metaphors?), it’s more than time for me to get more of my financial paperwork online.

Also, my receipts were all hanging out in a single envelope, and that’s unsightly. While I’m not ready to go all out like FB’s scan-a-thon, oh but I would LOVE to, I did want to get started.

So, I grabbed all my receipts, and sat up organizing them into several categories for the Schedule C portion of my income: Gasoline, Business Clothing, Business Gifts, Cell Phone, Dry Cleaning, Travel and Office Supplies. Then, I opened up a new spreadsheet and a kajillion new sheets on Google Docs. The dates, amounts and any applicable notes for each receipt were recorded in chronological order. It only took about two hours to sort, create, and enter the data.

Now that all of the amounts are in a single place, I can easily PDF the whole thing, and take them to my friend’s house to hang out with his dad and learn how to really do taxes next year.

My next step? Getting a good deal on a scanner and scanning all of the tons of files that I’ve got in my room. Offhand, I have files for:

~ auto insurance, maintenance and registration records for three cars
~ Rollover IRA statements
~ FSA records
~ old BT credit card records
~ airline and hotel rewards membership numbers and information
~ tons of credit card statements from the past few years
~ household bills/statements
~ cell phone records
~ payroll records
~ past three or four years’ worth of tax returns

I could recycle some serious paper!

*Now I’m oogling multipage scanners. I don’t need that…. I need to save money more than I do time. Then again, hmmm……*

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