We got back from Florida last week and instead of watching March Madness NCAA Basketball, we are up to our eyeballs in March Madness … Paperwork.
It turns out that bills, taxes, and legal work doesn’t go away when you are goofing off in the Sunshine State. All of that paperwork is waiting for you when you get home!
We had a large – 24” tall – box of unopened mail when we got home on Wednesday night. Most of it was junk mail, but a lot were bills and tax documents. We had paid many of the bills online when we were gone, but we still had to sort through which ones were paid for February, which were paid for March, and which weren’t paid at all. Unfortunately, we had a few late fees – which probably made a few companies happy as we usually pay bills on time..
The most pressing paperwork we had to get onto right away involved real estate. We had a private mortgage that had settled while we were gone, but hadn’t got our money yet. It was a few hundred thousand dollars that hat hit a snag because someone errantly wrote the wrong middle name for my wife 7 years ago on a trust document. Once we got back to town, we could make a few stops and get some legal documents notarized. By this morning (Monday) we had our money in the bank!
We also had a lot of paperwork needed for the townhome we bought for our son. We had to set up a dedicated checking account to manage the inflows/outflows, create a lease for the first time ever, file everything with the HOA, and collect our first month’s rent. Next up is getting the handyman over there to take care of a few things.
What I haven’t gotten to yet is my 2021 Income Taxes. I called our accountant from Florida a couple weeks ago and tell her to just file an extension for us. I’m pretty certain there is no way we can be done by April 18th this year. We’ll still have to send them a check by that date, but the rest of the paperwork can follow into June this year. I promised her I would start uploading things to her secure portal this week.
I guess I can follow the NCAA March Madness as I work on my taxes this week. Who else is struggling under a pile of paperwork this month?
Image Credit: Pixabay
MrFireStation 
Really interesting post as it’s a reminder of “another thing to figure out in post-FIRE life!” I’m pre-FIRE and think we’d like to tour the US and be nomadic for months on end. The stack of mail waiting at home doesn’t sound fun 🙂 I wonder how “van lifers” deal with this? Hopefully you can take a break and get some basketball games in, or golf!
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I think we just need to automate all of our bill paying. We’re behind the times in doing that – my wife still pays most bills by paper check. And, another problem we had this year is that two house closings got scheduled after we left for FL. We’ll be better prepped next year!
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Lol! I can relate! We had the same pile of mail in February when we returned from FL. The mail just keeps coming and coming! Fortunately, we automated every expense to our Visa years ago for the 2% cash back, and to allow us more freedom from the monthly task of paying bills. So we only really had to schedule the Visa payoff and find the relative tax statements out of our huge stack of junk mail.
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That’s what we need to do … automate all of our bills. We’ll do better next year!
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