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The pits
Taxes. Yep, the deadline for filing your personal income tax is just about here. May 2 at midnight is the magic line drawn in time (since April 30 falls on a Saturday). Federal income tax is something that boils away inside my head year-round. Even though I don’t think LOML and I have anything to hide from the CRA, I still get that creepy, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and a dull headache when I hand our information and receipts over to the bookkeeper.
Yeah, we use a bookkeeper. We’ve learned our lesson regarding DIY filing. It just doesn’t work for us. In the past, I’ve filed using the forms available at the post office and I’ve even filed online. It turns out, because I hate dealing with money and LOML hates dealing with the federal government, the pain is much relieved with the help of a bookkeeper. It’s a match made in some kind of hellish-heaven. Is there a story behind this? Of course there is.
Sometime in the early 1970s, we got all sassy and purchased a money-pit of an income property. We fell for the hype. “Buy an income property,” they said. “It’ll pay for itself,” they said. “You’ll be laughing all the way to the bank,” they said. Well, as it turned out, our sentence was 12 years of hard labour on that income property. We spent those years shovelling our hard-earned money into our home and the income property pit. When we purchased those places, we were told the property was practically turnkey. Turns out, the words “practically” and “turnkey,” in County-speak, aren’t in the dictionary. We were unfamiliar with the language, having been here for a mere four years. The property was almost the opposite of “turnkey.”
Yessiree, we bought a semi-detached home. We lived in one side and rented the other side. Finding a renter wasn’t a problem. Did we bank the rental income and use a portion to pay the mortgage? Nope. Didn’t happen quite as suggested or as planned. The Pit, as we affectionately called our abode, needed a new roof. This we found out the day after we moved in when the summer sky opened up and rain fell for the next two weeks. The rain fell inside and outside. The so-called “new roof” failed instantly and epically.
On top of the roof issue, the list of deficiencies was way longer than we could have anticipated. No attic vents. No gutters or downspouts. Windows that you could barely open, let alone see through. New floors and flooring were needed on the rental side along with new ceilings, especially where the roof caved into the back bedroom during the torrential downpour. New doors all around. New furnaces. New water heaters.
With the help of a friend, LOML and I updated the wiring from (new in 1930) 60 amp knob-and-tube to whatever the standard was back in the day. One summer, after years of toil, we rolled up our sleeves, put on our rubber boots and dug up the foundation to patch holes that let water in on the basement level. I’m not talking a trickle of water, more like flood waters of biblical proportion.
And on. And on. What does this have to do with taxes? Well, we didn’t know all of what we were doing to the income side of the building could be “expensed” against the income from the rent. Over a bottle of beer, or ten, kind friends listened to us moan and groan then pointed us in the direction of a local bookkeeping service. In a way, we were off to the races. Less went to income tax and more went to getting the property more “livable.” The moment the backbreaking work on that house was finished (after year twelve of our sentence), we lost our taste for income properties and sold it. We did keep the bookkeeper, however. If all we learned in 12 years was to hire an expert where expertise was needed, then we learned a lesson.
With the exception of two years since the seventies, we have continued to use a bookkeeping service to get us through the maze that is income tax time. Recently, we learned that travelling for medical appointments could be a deductible expense on our return. Who knew? I guess we should have. The bookkeeper asked us if we had travel expenses for medical to report. Why does paying income tax have to be so complicated? It was easier to repair a basement wall than it is to navigate thriugh a 5000-S1 T1. Just my humble opinion.
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