Tuesday, March 23, 2010

One of the two certainties in life

I doubt I'm anywhere near the first of the two certainties, but the second one "Taxes" can often make one feel like "Death" is the preferred option.

I've actually been way ahead of the game for the last few years, and I've also used an accountant for the last five or six years to have this done for me. But since I have a few more day time hours as of late, I decided that this will be the year I save a bit of money and do them myself!

Quicktax seems to be the most comprehensive program in Canada to manage this task, and so I started the process yesterday afternoon. Plugging the the T4 and T4a information was a piece of cake, but now I'm getting into all my self-employed income and expenses which will take me a while, include all my vehicle expenses, home office expenses, travel, lodging, cell phone use, and the list goes on. Every year at this time I say to myself - I really should keep better record of all I do every year - but the problem with tax season being four months into the year already, I feel I'm already too late to start for this year. I guess it shouldn't be that hard to do - certainly no more difficult than trying to look at all my receipts for 2009 in one sitting. Will I learn this lesson? we'll see.

In the mean time, here in Edmonton, we are waiting for the weather here to decide if it is really done snowing or not, and so I'm cleaning off the golf clubs in anticipation for opening day at the course. Unfortunately, yesterday, it snowed, and it is expected to do this again through the week. So a little setback - but we'll get there.

For a bit of statistical humour - During the Gold Medal Olympic game last month, the City of Edmonton's main utility provider provided us a graph of the water usage in the city. It was quite fun to see just how the game affected the city's toilet flushing - I'm guessing it was the same country-wide, as reports show that 80% of the Canadian population watch part or all of this hockey game:


(click for larger image)

Courtesy of Deadspin.com

1 comment:

ArtistFlop said...

If you netfile, MAKE SURE you keep a paper copy of *everything*. My Sweetie failed to do this, and had Revenue Canada lose all record of FOUR YEARS' WORTH of filings. He's had to go back to his employer and financial institutions to get duplicate copies of all documents so that he can re-submit. *sadness!*