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 14th (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.