Readers!
Happy (?) tax day. As a full time freelancer who does not have any W2 income (or a spouse I file with jointly), I make estimated payments to the State of New Jersey and the U.S. Government four times a year. So the April tax day is a deadline for filing, but also when I pay both my estimated tax, and whatever else I owe for the previous year if I underpaid on those estimates.
See gif above.
When other freelancers ask me about taxes, I give them one piece of advice and one piece only: get an accountant.
I’ll say it again:
GET
AN
ACCOUNTANT
!
!!
!!!
And that accountant should be someone who has previous experience working with self employed people.
This is especially true for new freelancers, because your entire tax picture has changed. If you hire an accountant for a few years and then think you can do it on your own, that’s fine! But at least to start, hire someone — and then write off their fee on next year’s taxes.
If you don’t want to take my word for it, I’ll add this: I have a friend who is an accountant and freelancer writer. THEY hire someone to do their taxes, because it’s not an area of tax law they know.
Oh I lied I have two things. If you find out you underpaid (or didn’t make estimated payments when you needed to) and owe lot in taxes for whatever reason, it’s perfectly fine to do a payment plan with the IRS. I had to once, and said friend mentioned above that they were surprised I’d been freelancing that long without having to. We’re not perfect, especially with such fluctuating income. The government just wants to know they’ll get their money. You’re not a bad person if you need to use that option.
Recent Bylines
“Shouldering the Burden of How to Treat Shoulder Pain” Tufts Now
What I’m Reading
- We’ll Meet Again by Hilary Green. After 17-year-0ld Frankie Franconi meets a dashing solder while waiting about German bombings of London during WW II, she decides she wants to do more than sitting at home during the war, and is recruited (by said dashing soldier) to be a code reader for spies behind enemy lines. I spent most of the book wondering if I’d read this before, or confused it The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff, which also features women who trained in code and spy craft much like they do here. I don’t know — does it matter? Not so much. I picked this up at American Bookstore, an English language bookstore in Milan, where I also bought postcards featuring characters from Disney’s the Hunchback of Notre Dame. It took me a while to get to it, but I’m glad I did. As a WW II romance, it does just fine. I’m also relatively certain it’s out of print in the U.S. (or never came here) so picking it up Italy was good lucky on my part.
- The Ship of Dreams: The Sinking of the Titanic and the End of the Edwardian Era by Gareth Russell, read by Jenny Funnell. Today is tax day, but it’s also the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 (I only learned this as I was editing the newsletter, I didn’t plan it!) As much as it’s become part of the culture and often a punchline, I’ve always been haunted by it, and after watching the a documentary about the finding the boat as a kid, had nightmares for weeks. And yet here with are with this 2019 book, which tells the story of the Titanic through six people aboard, including an actress, the president of a railroad company, and a department store executive, sometimes with down to the minute detail. Through the doomed journey, Russell also wrote about the world around them at the time, including about how inflation leads to fascism ha ha ha why would that be relevant? Anyway, this was great, and lead me to another realization. I was trying to figure out which documentary gave me the nightmares, and guess it’s Secrets of the Titanic, which came out in 1987, two years after the shipwreck was found. I’d have been seven years old, which was part of a few years when a lot of things lead me to having nightmares. Lo and behold, I figured out at the age of 44 years old that I wasn’t just a scardy cat or too sensitive or whatever I was told then, but I was probably having night terrors! NIGHT TERRORS! Reading: you learn stuff in very indirect ways.
What I’m Watching
- Death on the Nile. This is the 1978 version, which does not hold up well at all. I laughed when someone died because it looked so silly, and as you can imagine of a movie with a mostly white cast set in Egypt in the 1970s, phew a lot of racist stuff here. BUT! It does have Maggie Smith stomping around in men’s clothing, and Angela Lansbury playing a rich drunk.
- Mormon No More. I have a few friends who recently left the Mormon church, so I’ve been trying to learn more about it. This docu-series focuses on one queer couple, and expands out from there with other peoples’ experiences leaving. I skipped a bunch of stuff about the main couple planning their wedding, but worth it otherwise.
- Number One on the Call Sheet. This is a two-part series about Black actors’ experiences in Hollywood, and phew it’s good. The first episode is men; the second is women, and I was crying by the end. If you’re looking for something else on AppleTV+ to watch because you bought a month or two for Severance, this is it.
- Sicily: Land of Love and Strife. After reading two bad novels about Sicily, I thought I should try a non-fiction source (also, this came across my Hoopla feed). I learned a lot. I did not know the importance of puppetry in Sicily – among other things! They also talk about Agatha of Sicily, which is one of the more intense saint stories I’ve ever heard, and I’m the one who visited the Genoa Cathedral, which features St. Lawrence being cooked on a grill, last year.
Nail Polish of the Week
Shaking my Sugarplums by OPI. And you know what? I don’t like it. A purple with a pink shimmer is just not for my skin tone/mood/vibe/what have you. Ah well. One good thing about doing my nails every week is that I don’t need to live with a choice for that long!
Until next time!
Jen A. Miller (she/her)
Notes from a Hired Pen ebook series
Like this post? Buy Jen a Coffee!
Bookshop.org and Libro.fm links are affiliate links
Leave a Reply