Feeling the pain of the dreaded tax bill
There’s no quicker way to send you spiralling into a deep dark financial depression than the appearance of an unexpected bill. For me, it was a tax bill. We all eagerly hold our breath at the end of each financial year and let out a collective sigh of joy when it turns out that for whatever reason, we are due a little bit of money back. We don’t question how, we just file that tax return quicker than you can say Working for Families.
When the worn out shoe is on the other foot though, we (in my experience) go through the seven stages of financial grief. After receiving our family tax bill from our accountants last weekend, I am about three-quarters of the way through those stages.
It started with shock and denial, and lots of it. Enough shock for me to send Ben straight to the supermarket to add to — but also try to lesson — our financial woes with a bottle of wine. We then moved on to pain and guilt, this kind of tax bill I had to pay caused a lot of pain, let me tell ya. The anger and the depression then set it, as well as the headache from the cheap wine. Eventually we turned a corner a few days later, and now I’m just sitting here waiting for the acceptance and hope for some kind of tax miracle to come.
And the hope part is the funny one. I hoped the accountants had got it wrong, but they never do, then I hoped we would win Lotto but we never did. So now all I can hope is the kids don’t notice cheap peanut butter in their usual jar of Pics, and more so, I can only hope that Ben doesn’t notice our wine now comes out of a bladder and not a bottle. Thankfully he’s not high maintenance so I think we’ll be fine. There’s always a silver lining though — once the wine has been drunk from the bladder of casked wine, we can blow it up just like we did when we were kids and use it as a floating device or a camping pillow for that holiday we’ll never be able to afford again.