It’s that time of year, tax time. For us, it’s a great time because it usually means a refund. I do a few things throughout the year to make sure this is a smooth process. I thought I’d write a short post to hopefully help you not feel overwhelmed with the whole thing.
Simple Steps:
- Give yourself a deadline to have your paperwork together and ready for you to file or to take to your accountant. Valentine’s Day is my personal deadline to prepare my paperwork to file our taxes. Choose a day that works for you and put it on your calendar.
- Organize your filing cabinet. This is where I go through each file and shred the previous years paperwork. For example, I will shred 2014’s electric bills. I go through my medical file and put all receipts and EOBs in order. I also keep track of our medical spending on a piece of notebook paper in our financial folder throughout the year. I will be sharing more on that with you in the next few weeks. To understand my full filing cabinet system read 5 Steps to an Organized Filing Cabinet.
- Go online and print off necessary paperwork. I go onto our church website and print off our giving statement. You may need to do the same thing.
- Clip like papers together. I take all giving statements, medical receipts, pay stubs, W-2s, bank statements, and other groups of paperwork and clip them together with paper clips.
Follow my 4 simple steps and you will be well on your way to getting your tax refund sooner than you can imagine!