The other thing you can be sure of in Life, besides Death...

That does it. From now on, I stop try­ing to do this myself and get an accountant.

When we lived in Boston, we had a com­pli­cated tax sit­u­a­tion. I was fre­quently work­ing as a con­sul­tant, and worked with an accoun­tant who knew us like fam­ily, but even­tu­ally left the busi­ness (Genevieve, wher­ever you are and what­ever you are doing, I hope you’re happy) to make sure that I could make the right deduc­tions, amor­tize the depre­ci­a­tion of equip­ment pur­chases, and fig­ure out when it was best to pay esti­mated tax vs. go nearly broke in late April.

I though that after we moved to Canada it would get sim­pler, and up until this past year, it was. I had mostly income from one employer, and we didn’t do much in the way of retire­ment invest­ing (hey, when you don’t have much income from a pre­vi­ous year, you can’t sock much away in an RRSP — what used to be a 401K for us). There was no notion of a joint return here and the forms even looked a lit­tle sim­pler, I think.

In 2007, that all changed, and I should have real­ized this fact a while back, but pro­cras­ti­na­tion of tax prep is some­thing I’ve done all my life. When you’re a self-employed per­son and keep­ing your money in your account as long as pos­si­ble is your goal, fil­ing taxes early never makes much sense, unless you pre­fer the plea­sure of not scram­bling on April 14^th (the tax dead­line day for the US) . So, after 7 or so hours of agony, I’ve decided that it is just too damned hard to do my own return any more. I used some soft­ware, Tax­Tron — which was pretty hard to use, but which did the cal­cu­la­tions, but the ques­tions were still cryp­tic (CNIC? QPP/CPP pen­sion­able earn­ings? Coti­sa­tions de l’employé au RPC? Huh?). I’m prob­a­bly going to file an amended return for this past year’s mess after May 1, and for sure next year it will be under the care­ful guid­ance of a CGA (That’s what a CPA became after the move). I’ve learned my les­son. Now, if I could only get my Sun­day refunded back to me, since I worked yes­ter­day, albeit for the last time for a while. So much for a Spring weekend.