Taxing Thoughts

I prepare my taxes hastily in April, only to repent in May.

To be clear, I do not “prepare” my taxes in the strict sense of the word.  I have a competent accountant, also named Ellen, to whom I am both addicted and indebted.  Without her, my head would have exploded years ago.  It is enough that I use the weeks leading up to the Federal deadline to comb through a year’s worth of slips and stubs, sorting out the relevant items for the purpose of completing a “workbook” that forms the basis of the real accounting challenge.  

The haste stems from my general aversion to this task.  It is so odious to me—I have even delayed writing about it—that I procrastinate indefinitely, each day building up a little more courage with which to engage.  I make deals with myself, promising all sorts of treats and rewards when the deed is done and on its way to the professionals.  In the past few years I began involving my husband in this charade.  I spend days staging the scene with piles of paper, lists of on-line resources, sharpened pencils, checkbooks, and a calculator.  Then, once I sit down, he becomes my personal slave.  As I toil through the workbook, compiling the many facets of our lives into business lines, he is on-call to deliver drinks and sustenance according to my whims.  He does this willingly, lest he inherit the task for himself.  After I finally begin the process, there is so little time remaining that I rush through, sticking to my seat until it is finished.  By the end, my neat columns of figures have given way to scribbles and scrawls, swiftly dashed off to give the illusion of rigorous completion.  Even once it is sealed in the envelope, I do not exhale until a hand-off has occurred.  I rush to the post office to pass the baton, anxious to set the other Ellen into high gear as I collapse in an exhausted halt.

Soon after the filing date and exchange of funds, the repentance begins.  It’s not that I lie or cheat—I am too afraid of the big, bad government for that.  What lingers is the remorse over everything that has passed through our fingers.  The tax preparation process is a stunning reminder of goals not met, material excess, and the slipping sands of time.  I also find the magnitude of our financial contributions as citizens alarming.  I wonder how it is that we pay so much higher a tax rate than everyone else on the planet.  I look to my kids, who are just beginning to take their places as adults and worry that they will emerge in a world where it will be difficult to sustain themselves.  Will they be able to feed their children, buy a house, fund their retirement?

Each year, the lingering pain of this process causes me to get overly aggressive with my kids over financial management.  Mostly, they choose to ignore this tirade as they do almost everything else I say.  Still, I believe these are important concepts for getting a leg up as an emerging adult in today’s world. 

• Pay yourself first.  No matter how little you make—even if it is a minimum wage summer job—designate a certain amount that you cannot touch.  Ever.  It can be $5 a week as a start, as long as every raise and windfall contributes some portion to growing that amount over time.  It is never too early to get in the habit of saving; it is also never too late.

• Record what you spend.  I started recommending this to my kids on trips and vacations and tried to get them to continue the discipline at college.  Most kids do not appreciate where their money comes from, so they also do not care where it goes.  If you get in the habit of writing down your expenditures (or recording them in the Notes on a SmartPhone) you will always be aware of the consequences of your financial decisions.  When you do not have money for something you want, you will have a record of what you chose instead.

• Build your own budget.  When my son moved from the dorm to his own apartment his expenses got out of control quickly.  Over vacation, I had him develop a 7-day menu for himself.  We then converted this into a shopping list and went to the store to cost out a week’s worth of groceries.  We even estimated the cost of each meal, figuring out where he could afford upgrades.  I then added additional funds to go out once each week and some additional slush money.  In total, this added up to about one-fifth of what he had been spending.  The process also yielded a handy shopping list that he could use to plan his grocery runs in advance.

• Avoid whims.  Kids are bombarded today with images of cool things, cultivating a constant sense of wanting.  When my son was little he was very impulsive.  Instead of fighting with him over every little thing he wanted, we kept a list on the refrigerator.  If he rationalized his wants instead of making demands, we would add the item to the list with a maximum of one item per day.  When the list reached ten things, we would work with him to cross items off the list until there was just one thing he wanted above all others.  After a while, just arguing to get something on the list became satisfaction in itself.  This same idea works for a teenage girl who wants every item she sees in a catalog.

• Cash, not card.  I worry that e-cash has transformed money into an abstract concept for kids.  As weird as it sounds, carrying a week’s worth of cash is a powerful management tool.  It is concrete and finite.  I find that when my kids carry cash, they are much less likely to want to spend it.  Perhaps they are more possessive when they see it.  When it begins to disappear they work harder to retain it. 

Technically, however, I am a fraud.  Despite these convictions, I have done a terrible job instilling my kids with good financial values.  Not only do I fail to enforce these ideas, I do not practice what I preach.  Spoiling my children has been my greatest joy in life these twenty years.  I berate myself for sheltering them too much from the realities of the world, but I am a pushover to their wishes--and they know it.  Stewing in my post-IRS penance, I vow in the year ahead to treat them as the adults they are.  I will hold them and myself to higher standards of restraint and discipline.  Now, that’s REALLY taxing!

Tomorrow's blog:  Decorum Forum