I find developing intense ongoing fear of making mistakes helps get things like this done. You have such an intense growing anxiety you get angry at companies not sending your documents on time so you can just get it done in February and be free of this horrible feeling like a rat chewing a hole in your brain. Also the acid reflux helps you control your over eating you do to cope with your anxiety.

One of my many tips on how to be broken in a productive way. Don’t follow me, I don’t need the stress of feeling responsibility for more people.

I used to work as a contractor so I was supposed to pay an estimate of taxes four times a year. It sucks getting your wages levied and paying the interest especially since I didn’t know I was supposed to do that until after a whole year when I finally filed them and got hit with fines

Related: I’m currently waiting in a lobby to retake my drivers test because my license expired last year and I just remembered to renew it.

lol who needs extensions?

i just dont file for years at a time sometimes. eventually I show up with some docs and they end up paying some of my money back.

this is not tax advice

OK but this is an advice tax: Pay me 12% of your income.

Not American but the adrenaline of filing taxes at the very last minute is unparalleled.

Come end of January, I get antsy waiting for HR to send out the W2 forms. I usually have the return already filled out by that point, only needing my official salary numbers; I just do some quick back of the napkin math for that until the W2 comes. By the time all the tax forms come in, all I need to do is plug in the numbers, give it a final check to make sure I didn’t miss anything, and then it’s sent off. Haven’t had an issue doing it this way in years.

The trick is to be more afraid of not filing your taxes than literally everything else in your life. Give yourself deadline anxiety on January 31st. Can’t snack. The IRS is gonna hunt you down like a gnu at the watering hole. Can’t watch anything because it tells the snipers which room you’re in. Reading? Like a gazelle reading at the watering hole right before the revenue lion eats its legs?

I actually got a refund last year, so I filed just before the deadline, lol. Mostly because I had medical leave and the short term disability company made up a bunch of reasons not to pay me, so my income was lower overall, but first time I didn’t owe thousands since Trump’s first term when they messed up the deductions for lower middle class people, even with declaring no deductions on my W-4s. Almost had to pay a fine the first year because they didn’t take enough money, and I didn’t know I needed to ask them to take extra even with 0 deductions. But I guess the illusion of a tax cut when really it was only for the very wealthy was the whole point.