Pay up

When I became an adult, my dad taught me how to do my taxes.  In the beginning, it didn't take long, and I kind of enjoyed it.

Then, one year I moved to a different state and was working for myself.  It required more paperwork, but it was fine.

Then I got married and worked in three states in one year.  It took me about three days to do our taxes that time.

I well remember my dad doing taxes when I was growing up.  He enjoyed doing them, and he was good at it.  Even while I was an adult, I called him for tax advice.

So when we came home to the farm, we ... hired an accountant!

Sometimes people ask me if I "do the books" for the farm, since a lot of spouses on farms do.  (Sort of a division of labor.)  I try not to laugh, because that is probably the last job I would ever volunteer to do.  Not that I'm horrible at math, (I do have a calculator), but I'm bad at making spreadsheets that anyone else understands.  They're clear to me, but probably the IRS would not see them the same way.

As a result, today Kris had a five-hour meeting with our accountant to do end-of-the-year tax things.  They meet once a year.  Kris keeps meticulous records and gives him both paper and online information.  They discuss it and we pay him to do the work. 

Kris scheduled this meeting a really long time ago, but today was a fantastic day for it!  Today was the wind chill of -26 with a thermometer reading of -9.  It got up to 4 degrees at one point.

This morning when Kris went to feed the cows at 6:00 a.m., the tractor wouldn't work.  It would run for five seconds, then stop when the fuel gelled.  He did that about ten times and gave up.  He got the space heater and put it against the fuel filters.  After he warmed it up for 20 minutes, it started and stayed going. 

The little amount of feeding he could do before he had to leave for his meeting, he had to do at low idle.  The tractor wouldn't rev up.  As a result, feeding took a lot longer than normal.

Also, something I never thought about.  We can't push manure into the lagoon anymore.  Manure is usually mostly liquid and it just slides down the angle into the bottom.  But!  When it's all frozen, it doesn't slide down the wall.  It just builds up on the wall, so you can't push any more in.  The guys were making piles on the cement and planned on putting it in the manure spreader.  However, since the manure spreader was frozen, the chain broke.  The guys spent the rest of the day fixing that.

In comparison, it almost makes paying taxes look better.

Is it 2012?

Yesterday Kris was working on tax documents. Since we've been here, we've asked my mom to type up the W-2s we need to give our employees. (Why my mom? Because she has a typewriter. Do you know how hard those are to find?)

Kris decided this year he'd do it all online instead. No typewriter needed! So he spent a lot of time doing it that way, and then the government told him they couldn't verify his business address and it would take four business days to rectify the situation. Unfortunately, W-2s are due to the employees in two business days. He wanted to scan and email them the documents to prove we live where we live, but they only allow faxes. So he's going to town to use a fax machine.

So our taxes are still dependent on an obsolete machine.

Maybe we'll be able to do it all online next year, just with the magic of this newfangled computer!

The tax man cometh

Kris worked on taxes today. He had to change his spreadsheet for calculating employee federal tax withholdings. He used what they call the percentage method so it can be calculated - as opposed to looking at an approximately 20-page chart every two weeks to get the withholding for that period.

The government usually publishes other ‘alternative method’ tables. But they didn’t publish the one Kris was using for 2011 … at least not yet. (Oh, didn’t 2011 start 17 days ago, you may be asking yourself?) So Kris couldn’t just change the numbers, he had to change the whole formula.

Tax changes happen every year. Some things that change are good – like they changed the social security and Medicare tables. The employee rate went down, but the employer rate didn’t. So where you used to be able to take the same number and multiply it by two, now it’s different …

All this fascinating detail is why a lot of people hire this done. We do hire out end of the year taxes to be done - because of all the changes every year - it’s hard to keep up with the tax code. Kris already feels like he’s cheating by hiring the end of the year taxes done, and can handle payroll. But it’s not fun. No one loves paying taxes, few love doing taxes. But it’s part of owning any (legitimate) business.

***

I can’t help myself from taking pictures of the spectacular sunrises lately. I asked Kris if he saw the sunrise today while he was working, and he said, “Yeah, I appreciated it about one second before I went back to thinking about how cold I was.”