Kyle Hepp

January 26, 2011

Thank you to TurboTax for sponsoring my writing about household finances.Learn more about how TurboTax can help you find every tax deduction you deserve. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.

Ahh. Managing the good old family finances.

This responsibility falls square on my shoulders. Seba doesn’t know much about our budget and doesn’t care to know. Fine by me. The only time he cares to notice is when he asks if he can make a big ticket purchase. I check out the budget, calculate it in there and give him a yay or nay. Most of the time, the answer is “Yes.” We are doing fine financially and if one of us wants something, he/she buys it. Month to month we’re not scraping by or anything of the sort. I keep my budget for one main reason and that’s to assure that we always have a sufficient amount in our savings. Why? Duh. Because we’re self-employed.

Though for Seba, he has to somehow justify the purchase in his head. How does he do that, you wonder? Simple — he writes down every time I spend money on clothes or shoes or some other item that he considers to be “unnecessary.” As if clothes were “unnecessary”! Does he want me shooting weddings in the nude? Anyway, he keeps a running tab. Whenever he buys anything “unnecessary,” he subtracts it from the total of how much I’ve spent. So say I spent $100 dollars on a dress and then Seba spends $50 on a. on a. on a…I can’t even think of the last time he made an “unnecessary,” purchase, so for the sake of this blog post, let’s just say he spends $50 dollars on a shirt. In his mind that would mean he still has $50 dollars to spend from “his account.” This is a little silly. He doesn’t try to stop me from spending money on things. And he still almost never buys anything. However, in the past year, he’s gotten up to about $900 dollars and when we move into the apartment he wants to buy a plasma TV with that money.

Anywho.

As wedding photographers, our job is seasonal. Less so since we travel back and forth to other countries during the down season in Chile. But, still. The bulk of our income is made in just a couple months. So A. We need to be like squirrels and hoard away lots of money for the cold winter months so we don’t starve to death. B. I like the idea of always having an emergency fund on hand.  C. In the event that both Seba and I somehow manage to start a chemical fire in the computer room and both burn eyeballs to the point of going blind, I have enough money in the bank to refund all the deposits we’ve been paid for future work + live for about six months before we’re out on the street. And D. I need to make sure that the money I’ll owe to Uncle Sam for the following year is stashed away so I can pay him without having to scrounge for money.

Weirdly enough, I kind of like paying taxes. Owing the government money means that I made enough to do so. Quite an accomplishment. I’ve been below the poverty line during my college years and trust me, I might not have had to pay any taxes, but it still wasn’t fun being that poor. However, having one foot in Chile and one foot in the U.S. means that tax time is complicated. We owe a little here, a little there, a little bit of money everywhere. I feel like I’m in a money-oriented Dr. Seuss book. So three cheers to paying taxes, three cheers to tax time being a really great excuse to drink champagne and three cheers to a program like Turbotax, that can make life a helluva lot less confusing!