Your 2021 Tax Prep May Make You Cry
But not for the reasons you expect
Of all the seasons, my least favorite is tax season. Every year, right around when February turns into March, I know it’s about time for me to dig out my receipts, ransack the Finances folder in my email account, and start accounting for how I made and spent my money over the past year. Nothing makes me feel more infantile than my yearly silent temper tantrum at the thought of tax time. Inevitably, I put it off in favor of work or Netflix or the NBA until finally the clarion call of April 15, or the polite reminders of my accountant, are too much to hold off, and I take the bulk of a Sunday to get it done. I compile my lists of donations and business expenses, sort all the tax paperwork that has arrived in the mail, and (shudder) determine how much money I made last year. It’s all fairly familiar and faintly terrible and less traumatic in retrospect, once the job is complete, than it feels like before I get started.
In any year, I suppose, the act of compiling your taxes is a kind of recap of the year that passed, albeit one funneled through a very particular lens. Anything not intimately connected to spending, earning, or consumption does not rate in this accounting — no pun intended — of your time. You are reminded, in searching through credit-card bills and bank withdrawals, of the places you…
