Exhilarating Tax Time

I take advantage of a brief intermission in my day to tell you that last week; I took some time to file our taxes. It was kind of exhilarating as we are getting a huge tax return this year because of our Special Extra RRSP Contribution for 2015.

My old college teacher wouldn’t be proud of me as for him, getting a juicy tax return meant you lent your money to the governments for nothing. It certainly would have been better to arrange for smaller payroll deductions and get a smaller tax return afterwards. But I’m sure he would be lenient with me for once as special circumstances justify my oversight. The bottom line is that, in the end, we will have more money in our pockets.

We will use that substantial return to save some more in 2016 as all our main family projects already have been planned for. This will generate some kind of snowball effect: special savings in 2015 result in special tax return in 2016 which leads to even more savings in 2016 and so on and so forth.

For many years now, I’ve made it a point to file our tax returns myself. That way, I can understand all the implications and save as much as possible on unnecessary taxes; for example, applying all our family’s medical expenses only on my own tax return made us recover a couple hundred bucks again this year. 

It didn’t take me that long to complete the process. Easily accessible state-of-the-art tax softwares available in our modern era sure simplify things as well as carefully organizing our tax documents throughout the year.

I always thought people were missing on some very interesting saving opportunities when they prepare their tax return at the last minute; they also increase the odds of sometimes forgetting deductions that would entitle them a refund.

In the same matter, every tax season, we carefully choose when to file each of our 4 tax returns. This year, it meant doing it as early as possible as we can’t wait to get our hands on all those big fat checks!

In reality, they are more like intangible transfers nowadays but they can still be pretty satisfying.

That’s it for now. Forgive me for finding tax filing so fun!

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