Of Death and Taxes

[mdlbear]

Death comes into it because I heard from my insurance broker yesterday; he had noticed the activity on my account. He mentioned that, rather than cashing out the policy, I could have borrowed against the death benefit instead. Right. As if the whole point wasn't to reduce my level of debt, and eliminate yet another monthly payment. There's a reason why I don't like to do business over the phone: I don't like having to make decisions like that on the spur of the moment.

Yesterday I downloaded the year-end reports from Paypal and Amex. That's all I need, since Amex is the only card I use for online transactions, and I have paper receipts for everything else. Started data-entry this morning; I'll probably have the checkbooks done today. I do my tax-related data entry into a flat file using Emacs, then compute the subtotals with a Perl script.

The next step will be going through the paper receipts for credit card (and debit card, now that I have one for my business account) transactions. I also still need to sort through this year's charity mail looking for more receipts, and do triage on last year's investment and banking statements. On the whole the shoebox method of organizing still works for me, although these days it requires a file cart and two banker's boxes.

It was raining gently when I got up this morning. Very calming.

Comments

[lapislaz.livejournal.com]

Barney is (quite wisely, I believe) taking the whole file over to the AARP this afternoon. Did you know they have a free tax service?

[mdlbear]

No, but at this point I'm pretty comfortable with the software, and getting it ready is more than 3/4 of the work anyway. Actually cranking the numbers takes only an afternoon.