Spring, Taxes, and Windows

After all of the surgery talk, it seems a little strange to get back to talking about my own boring life…so I guess I’ll pack a few things into one post and make myself feel more interesting!

Easter was a hoot! It was really Hannah’s first Easter where she was aware of life enough to see something different about it. We had invited mom and Kim over for brunch (regular Sunday family dinner was out with Pa still in the ICU) so we ran to Smith’s on Saturday night to pick up some bacon and orange rolls. Man, the store was a madhouse! The aisle with all the Easter stuff on it looked like a tornado had blown through too! We’d only planned on some fruit and basic breakfast purchases, but Jon couldn’t pass up the Reese’s mini eggs, and we ended up loading up on last minute holiday goodies…just like everyone else in the store. Jon also found a giant purple bunny that, once seen, Hannah would not let go! She played with it till bedtime, when we hid it from her for a bigger impact the next morning. I stayed up late and got the cutest dress all finished for Hannah, and she was the bell of the ball for all of Sunday.
Here’s a little snippet of her Easter Morning.

Doesn’t she twirl well?!

The next bit of craziness this week has been taxes! Yes…the dreaded…awful…kick-in-the-pants bit of badness that we experience every spring. Last year, we ended up having to pay over $3,000.00 because of the business self-employment tax. Don’t get me started. This year, we figured that it was going to be something pretty similar, so when Jon kept putting off doing our taxes, I couldn’t really blame him. By Sunday night though, I went looking for all our tax paperwork and left him a folder to get started with it all. My W-2’s were missing, but my office was fantastic and just emailed me a pdf on Monday morning that I forwarded to Jon. Whew! Bless modern technology! We’d decided just to take our W-2’s and 1099’s along with our account info from the wedding business over to an H&R Block guy and let him have his way with it. Jon was just too stressed to worry so much about it, and it would be worth paying the $60 to not have to bother. Well…come to find out, that’s not quite how it works. The $30 – $60 that you see advertised is for a REVIEW of your taxes and a possible warranty of sorts that says that if you get audited, they’ll back up what they reviewed and they’ll even represent you in any legal action from the IRS. If you want them to DO your taxes, it will run into the hundreds and hundreds of dollars. With a small business to tack onto the work, our fee would have been huge. Ugh. The woman at the accounting firm told Jon just to use Turbo Tax, do what he could and THEN have them review our work. At least she didn’t try to take advantage of us, and we already had everything together…might as well put in some hours and see what we could come up with.
On Tuesday, Jon input our tax info from the companies we work for, but he thought the personal business info looked so mountain high that he didn’t want to tackle it. That only hurt more because the basic info he was staring at said that we owed over $5,000.00 this time. I told him to just download the data into a spreadsheet and then wait for me. I’d handle it. Spreadsheet Woman! Remember?! Once Hannah was in bed, I kicked Jon off the computer and handed him the print-out of all our transactions for 2008 on the business account. I organized the spreadsheet by date, and read off the amounts to Jon, who confirmed to which vendors or sub-contractors all the amounts should be tagged. We had everything categorized in an hour. Jon was amazed. I re-ordered all the data to be in sections by category, and we were able to itemize everything into Turbo Tax in another hour and a half. Whew! By the time we’d entered all our expenses and inventory, Turbo Tax said that we lost over $100 or something in the business last year. Granted…there’s a new camera, lots of advertising, and tons of prints and property to our names now…but it seemed funny to think that after three years in the business, doing quite well at it, according to the government, we lost money. Well, good! Because of that, Turbo Tax said that we were going to get a refund of over $6,000.00!!! SCHNEIKIES!!! Rock on! Okay…we didn’t quite believe the fantasy, but it was such a pretty number to stare at for a while! Around 1:00 a.m., Jon realized that the program wasn’t recognizing his income from Circlepix, the real estate photography that he does. Ouch. He spent three hours on Wednesday morning talking to Turbo Tax on the phone trying to figure out why the program wouldn’t recognize something so simple. In the end, they FINALLY figured it out and ended up giving us a free copy of the professional program to get it to work right! Score! As Jon got that entered and finalized our deductions, assets, and charitable contributions, our final hit ended up someplace I can accept! We get $88 back from the government (I’ll like Obama for about five minutes here) and we only owe the state about $150. Whew! THAT I can handle! YAY! Jon got it all finalized, found a place online where we could pay the state via debit card along with our e-file, and BOOM! DONE! What a HUGE load off our minds!…AND our wallets. In the end, we realized that last year, we had been so combined using personal accounts for the business and vice-versa…so Jon under estimated what we told the IRS for all of our expenses just because we weren’t sure, couldn’t prove it, and didn’t have time to sort it all out. This year, with the seperate accounts, online data programs, and spreadsheet fun, we had it all down to the penny, and we’re okay! Score! It’s weird to think that the hit is so minor, even with the self-employment tax, and that if we’re audited, we have the paperwork to back it all up! Sweet! The next change is that we’re going to incorporate the company, and then we’ll REALLY be professional! We sound so adult!

The final fun is happening right now. New widows. Bright shiny new eyes to our home! It was SO not the time, and we didn’t think we could afford it, but something had to be done, and we’ve been so blessed to figure out answers as we’ve gone along! I tried to open the little window down in our basement laundry room about two months ago…and the glass snapped. No shatter or crack…really, it just snapped out a big chunk that landed in the snow outside, and that was that. It had to be replaced. Jon had been hearing ads on the radio for some company that was having a spring sale, so we called for an estimate. The shape of the broken window turned out to be weird and not one of their stock stuff that was so cheap as part of their sale. After talking with the guy for a while, we figured out that the laundry window by itself would run really high, but rolling it into replacig all the other windows at stock prices would end in a huge discount. So, you’re saying that we could replace one tiny window, and feel taken advantage of, or we would replace ALL the windows and feel like we got a great deal? Hmm. Yes, we got talked into it. And, again, SO not the time, not something we could afford, and how were we falling for it?…well…it really is a great deal and will save us huge amounts in heating and cooling alone! (As old as our windows are…single pain, uh, I mean, pane…huge, and on every outter wall…I am ALWAYS freezing or Jon is always roasting. Regulating some of what the house should be holding IN, will make a massive difference in our bills.) Between the date when we signed the contract, and today when the money for the windows is due, we’ve had half a dozen brides call and sign contracts for photography and flowers at good prices, all of them writing us deposit checks. We’ve also heard from a couple of past clients that still owed us final payments, and they have used their tax returns to get us paid off! Whew! The Lord really blessed us when we went out on that limb to improve our house and the potential resale of the place. Windows will make a great improvement. I’m going to feel MUCH better about letting Hannah sleep alone in her crib at night too when she tends to kick off blankets even though she’s right next to that big drafty window! Yay! Only about one more hour, and we should be down a big chunck of change from our account, but up a lovely set of six major investments to our house!

And that’s the random. Okay…not all that thrilling, but how can I compete with organ transplants and heart attacks!
Considering…I’ll take boring.

~ by bylorena on April 16, 2009.