Category: General

shadesofmauve:

pyoorkate:

shadesofmauve:

Accounts all finally balanced, and now I can do the tax part!

o/

Note to readers: If you want your US taxes to be quick and easy, do not

– rent rooms in your house
– occasionally operate a minuscule business

Or if you do, don’t report it. FFS. I am an upstanding near-socialist who is happy to pay taxes, but the US tax code is so complex that the process of doing so is ridiculous.

Also, a note to the IRS: Renting portions of the property you live in is a really common thing, now. Please acknowledge that somewhere – even just a FAQ – because the mental gymnastics of trying to be as honest as possible while recording my rentable room as a separate property that accounts for 20% of house expenses is… tiring. That, and not tax evasion, are why most people who do this don’t report – and why I wish I hadn’t. 

I don’t want to talk to the IRS. The last time I did I spent two hours on hold just trying to return someone else’s $2000. The time before that I was a teen accused of tax fraud because a data entry person made a mistake (and THIS is why we e-file, kids!).

I’m going to sacrifice a chicken and chant the Ward To Keep Away the IRS: I do not have enough money to be worth your notice. I do not have enough money to be worth your notice.

Between you and Kathryn I’m finding myself slightly unnerved by this part of moving to the USA. I mean, anything that gives me warm fuzzies about filling in the UK tax forms (which are, it must be said, positively a delight compared to the US ones I’ve seen)… well, let’s just say it’s not good.

Mind you, I still remember the one and only company tax return I did for my abortive music studio. Crying, a severe (near migraneous) headache, and days of playing balance the figures, and multiple phonecalls to the tax office to which their answer was, invariably, ‘We don’t know’… and all to end at ‘we owe you nothing, you owe us nothing’…

In your case, I strongly recommend you find a good accountant as soon as you touch down, explain what all you are planning on doing, and do whatever they tell you!

Calling the tax office for clarity is… not something people do. For starters, you’d be on hold for an hour or more just waiting…

Yeah, I don’t think its a thing people do much here, either. Mainly because when you ring and say “Does this mean X or Y” they say “Err, we don’t know”. And both Kathryn and I are very pro-accountant. Frankly I wanted one for the business I attempted to run before, but the partnership didn’t make enough to make it viable.

And my business partner liked to order things using the company card, but not keep receipts. Which made things quite exciting.

So, for Kathryn’s Birthday I hunted out a somewhat battered old anglepoise lamp with the intention of refurbishing it for her. It did look somewhat sad when I pulled it from the box…

After a really good clean, a lot of spraying, finding a very similar paint (courtesy of Cass art, who were lovely),

Unfortunately, I didn’t let it harden enough. It turns out that the acrylic spray paint isn’t as hard, as quickly, as the paint I’m used to – so I put in a box thinking it was dry and it led to marking on a couple of areas.

Reassembly was largely the reverse of disassembly.

However, the new springs I got that are meant to be remanufactured equivalents to the originals (which are no longer available) are hopeless. They fail to balance the lamp at all. There was much cursing at this point, because it was getting near to Kathryn’s birthday and I’d no other plan – the lamp came with a spring missing and a non-original spring.

Eventually I ended up adding a spring inside the two external springs and returning to the original main spring (slightly rusty though it is). It still doesn’t balance near as well as it should, but it at least holds in several more common positions.

I’ve not yet come up with a permanent solution though…