Tax man

You may not have noticed, but I’ve been trying to write here every day for the past few weeks. Part of it was sort of a de facto content challenge from Goblin’s daddy, and part of it was just my own sense that I neglect this space and that it’s a good way to get my writing muscles warmed up for the day, whether I do much writing beyond that or not. On the plus side, while I’ve not been writing here I’ve been working on the revision of the novel—even though I put in six hours on Sunday and wrote a couple new scenes, it’s a tiny bit unnerving to see the total word count go down by about a thousand. Nevertheless, I think most of those words needed to go. And yesterday, I spent the morning doing interviews for an article I have to turn in on Friday. So go me.

I bit the bullet this past weekend and filed my federal and state taxes. I also paid my federal taxes, thanks to the convenience of credit card payments—I can’t tell you how much it galls me to have to charge them, but at least I moved enough money from savings to my credit card first to cover them. It galls me even more to have to pull money out of savings to pay Uncle Sam almost an equivalent amount that I’ll get back in that (in my opinion) misguided rebate next month. And what will I be doing with that? Putting it on my credit card balance.

I still have to pay my state taxes, by check, through the mail. Why? Because the Show-Me State can’t get its act together and join the rest of us in the twenty-first century to process credit card payments. Perhaps that’s a good thing. It’s easy enough to fall into debt charging such extravagant luxury items as food and gas; the idea of paying interest on your taxes is enough to make me feel a little bit insane. 

Some of my income is freelance. Not all of it, luckily (though sometimes I question the value of that luck). Even so, this article at Salon on freelancing, finance, and self-employment contains some valuable tips even for me. I especially like #11.