Tax Prep

No Workout Today
A good night’s sleep made my body feel much better. I have to remember that the four hours of sleep I get between Tuesday and Wednesday isn’t enough to recover from a Max workout. Should be healed up by tomorrow but won’t force a workout until Monday.


Within a day of dealing with that Social Services jerk, I get a letter from Code Enforcement yesterday telling me to get the mattress off the porch—the mattress Nicky left on the porch ever since she moved in. So I had to call the Department of Public Works and they’re gonna take it out Monday with the rest of the trash. Code Enforcement. Social Services. Ugh. If it wasn’t for watching old episodes of Daria last night I would have been in a really foul mood. Seven... more... weeks.

With the deadline to file taxes quickly approaching, I’m searching for the best tax preparers available. For the past three years I’d been using this Nigerian guy that my mom uses. I talked about how he screwed up my taxes last year April in a post called Ten Thousand Dollar Man No More, forgetting to put that I had tenants in my property, putting that I owned only one property instead of two, and even stating that I lived in Brooklyn! With the way my luck was going at the time, I’m surprised I didn’t get audited. This time I’m looking for a professional that knows how to correctly file business taxes as well as personal taxes. I’ll look around and do my research this week, then file on Wednesday. One thing I noticed while preparing my taxes was the advantage of my two page lease.

The first page has the names and mailing addresses of the landlord and the tenant, as well as the agreed upon lease term and the first page of rules. The second page has the rest of the rules and the signature lines for both the landlord and tenant. The cool thing about this set-up is I can fix the lease terms and the rent price however I wish when I file my taxes. I change the first page with a blank lease paper then attach in to the signed second page, and I have a new lease! It has to be done intelligently though. For example, property Beta has tenants paying $525 and $600 respectively. The average rent price for a two bedroom in that neighborhood is from $650 to $700, so changing the lease to say that each tenant pays $700 is okay. The trouble comes when the landlord lies too much and puts that each tenant pays $900 when the market value for rent is $500. That’s just stupid and one is bound to get into trouble.

I can also put that Lex and his Indians stayed in the upstairs unit of property Alpha the entire year of 2011. There’s no need to bring Nicky’s regretful tenancy into the picture, as it covered only the last two months of the year. This makes filing taxes a lot easier, and easy is what I need right now. I’ll have to put that I live in the upstairs unit of property Chi, as I currently have my physical address as living in the downstairs of property Alpha. If I left my physical address as is, I wouldn’t be able to put that I collect rent for the unit in Alpha since I’d technically be living there, a $6300 loss of income for the year. I should definitely be able to get over 3k back in my tax returns, and finding the right tax preparer is what I’ll need to make all this happen the right way.

P.S.: I noticed a pattern. Every time I've had to deal with code enforcement, it has always been with a tenant with assistance of some kind. I'll have to add that onto the list of why I hate Public Assistance.