February Coffee Talk- What does your tax return say about you?

This post is part of February Coffee Talk, as hosted by First Gen American. Please check out her site to see all the other entries in the series.

 

What can you learn about me from my tax return? There are a lot of the standard little things.

Married, somewhat traditional- we have the same last name, C’s name is listed first on the tax return.

No kids.

We own our home.

We have lots of little investments, some of which lose money.

We donate to charity, but never in large amounts.

Education is important to us- we’re getting both student loan interest deductions and education credits.

Those are the basics. It doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot interesting there, until you look at one other little line item on Schedule A. We deduct our sales tax- but not the amount you’d get if you used the formula.

What does that mean? It means our house if filled with scraps of paper. All sorts of paper. We are only able to deduct our actual sales tax because we keep every single receipt- every single one. We do our best to put them in a ziplock bag as we collect them, but sometimes paper just floats around our house.

And, if we’ve done this before (we have) it means that we also have to keep these hundreds of little pieces of paper around for the purposes of being audited.

I’ve written about us being near hoarders. This is part of the reason why. We have an important reason for holding on to these pieces of paper- our taxes. And that’s really how it starts- you have reasons to hold on to paper. And then you start holding on to it for no reason, or you just never get around to throwing it out.

 

Argh- Okay- for my own mental health, I need to stop obsessing over our hoarding tendencies and move on. (And do some cleaning/decluttering.)

What secret vices (or other interesting facts) would your tax return reveal about you?