Last night I did my taxes for the first time ever. Google reported all my AdSense earnings, so I figured now was a good time to start reporting Tabulas earnings (they were too insignificant as a student to report). Good thing I redid the billing center; it literally took me 10 seconds ("SELECT SUM(sale_price) FROM sales WHERE sale_timestamp > '2004-12-31'") to get how much I've made from Tabulas!

Apparently because Tabulas is a sole proprietorship, I can write off a lot of expenses. All-in all, I think I'm actually getting back a sizable chunk of change from my refund (will have to double check this weekend).

I thought doing taxes would be harder, but it's pretty easy!

I figured tonight (since I wasn't sleeping) would be a good time to catch up some insignificant tasks I've been meaning to do:

  • Someone Amazon has about 10 different addresses for me - I finally found the page in the account center so it doesn't show up so many addresses - I literally would have to hunt on the confirmation screen whenever I bought something from Amazon
  • I got paid from my job, so I paid off my credit card balance for this month - I've been pretty good so far with this credit card on paying off my balance monthly!
  • I threw some more money (as you can tell, I've really not been able to spend any time dealing with financials) into my Roth IRA (I capped off my 2005 contributions) and invested the money into my mutual fund and I picked up a few stocks (just for fun).
  • Thanks to everybody who responded to my last financial post - the main reason I was talking about such conservative financial items was because I was looking for a fairly semi-liquid conservative place to put my "rainy day" money (which I guess is pretty unreasonable for me to ask). My Roth IRA is invested in aggressive mutual funds, but I'm trying not to do things that are too risky because I want to pull some of the Roth IRA money when I put the downpayment on a townhouse (whenever that happens within the next two years or so). I've decided to kill my Bank of America savings account (atrocious rates); I've opened a HSBC Online Savings Account - they're offering 4.80% until April '06 and 4.25% (I remember reading that number somewhere, but I can't find it anymore for reference). This'll be good enough just in case I need the extra money for something (the beloved Ford Taurus dies, unexpected medical costs, payment for a Russian mail-order bride); the rest of the money is going directly into the Roth IRA.

    My dad was trying to convince me to open a traditional IRA, but there's no way I'm planning right now for when I'm 59.5 years old right now.
  • I spent a few hours agonizing over whether I should buy a Canon 20D ($1200). I really am feeling the photography bug again (Spike's pictures certainly aren't helping!). For now, i'm going to hold off on it - even if I got it, I couldn't think of any serious subjects to shoot in this area.
  • I've been saving up my "fun spending money" fund for the past few weeks now, so I emptied it by going on a massive eBay and Amazon DVD spending spree.

And now it's 840am. Time to start working. It's been a generally relaxing night of getting stuff done ... it feels good to wrap up some of those small life tasks that you've been meaning to do (plus I get to cross off a lot of items on my listfoo todo lists ;)

Currently listening to: Jonny Lang - Dying To Live
Posted by roy on February 17, 2006 at 06:40 AM in Ramblings | 4 Comments

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Comment posted on February 18th, 2006 at 02:56 PM
So when is it significant enough for you to start filing taxes?
Comment posted on February 18th, 2006 at 02:55 PM
Filing taxes...that's one thing I'm not looking forward. @_@
Comment posted on February 17th, 2006 at 09:57 AM
did you even sleeP?
Comment posted on February 17th, 2006 at 08:54 AM
Sounds like you're off to a good start!