Death and Taxes

"Make sure you pay your taxes; otherwise you can get in a lot of trouble." ~ Richard M. Nixon 

(Well, I guess he'd know about getting in trouble, wouldn't he?) 

On April 15th, we'll be on top of the Rock of Gibraltar. It'll be hard to send in our tax return from there. And we can't do it before we leave because we won't receive our 1099s until the first week of February. So the DH has been working on filing an extension. We've never had to do this before, so there's a bit of a learning curve. We have to:

1. Estimate our income. We keep scrupulous records of our rental property and my book income, but we also need to figure the expenses that reduce that total. It's almost like doing the actual return, but because we won't have the 1099s, it's not official.
2. Fill out a Form 4868 and send it in...with a check for our estimated taxes. (See? It's like doing our taxes before we do our taxes.)
3. Do our actual return by October 15th. We won't wait that long. Because we'll send in more than we think we'll owe, we'll want the refund before then! 

Then we need to do a similar extension for our state as well. 

We also need to think about death before the cruise. Yeah, I know that sounds morbid, but we don't want our kids to have to go on a scavenger hunt if something happens to us. Before we took our 30 day cruise last year, the DH put together what we call The Doomsday Book. All our important papers are organized in one place--wills, titles, deeds, insurance info, records of all our assets and where to find them. The DH just needs to go through the Book and make sure nothing has changed since he put it all together. 

With this, we're close to ticking off all the things we need to accomplish before we go on the cruise. About the only thing left from my Makin' a List & Checkin' it Twice post is notifying our bank, Lifelock and CC companies that we'll be out of the country for a while. 

Oh! And the packing... like laundry, it's a chore that never seems to be done. You just run out of time and have to go with what you've got...

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