COVID Chronicles—Caution Prevails in Taxing Times

by Joan Rose

LW contributor

In our fight against COVID- 19, I’ve bravely had my two shots. After each shot, I waited the required 30 minutes, and thankfully, I had no reaction to them. So it’s been a few weeks since the last shot, and now I suppose I am immune! Hooray!

But it has been suggested that we be very cautious and continue to wear our masks outside because the virus is still rampaging across the world, and now the variants are something to worry about, as well.

So we are still kind of locked down, but at least we get to see our grandkids and small family groups.

How I would love to have a big family gathering, but now I must regroup and remember that I catch a simple cold easily, and it invariably leads to pneumonia. I have so many grands and greatgrandkids that one or more of them almost always has a cold or a runny nose. So I am back to my No. 1 rule: If your child has a cold, stay home!

Ah, but I miss them, and perhaps there will be a summer get-together, when no one in the family has a cold, and we can all gather together. I can only hope. In the meantime, I’ve become bored and a little ambitious again.

I was looking in my old rickety filing cabinet the other day, and as I filed away my 2020 tax return, I realized that I had a great number of tax returns saved in my cabinet. I wondered how long we were supposed to keep them, and after a quick check on Google, I found that you only need to keep tax returns for two or three years, or as long as seven years if you’ve done a special filing.

Sadly, I looked in the filing cabinet drawer and realized my tax returns go back at least 20 years. I am nothing if not prudent!

Since I hadn’t requested an audience with the Queen of England that day, I had nothing to do, so I pulled half the files out of the drawer and put them on the floor. Then I got out my trusty shredder, plugged it in, sat in my chair and opened the first file, dated 1992. I found lots of memos to and from my tax man that were interesting. Then I looked at the copies of the tax returns and realized with a shock that all these returns listed my Social Security number on every page. Not only that, but my signature was on both federal and state returns.

Being very aware of identity theft, I wasn’t happy with just shredding these files. No, I had to make the trashing of these files very complicated (but permanent) because I began to use a black marking pen to ink out all of these identifying items, page by page. Then I shredded each page.

As you can imagine, all this work took lots of time, but after three days of it, I had had enough. I had filled five huge garbage bags with the shredded files and thrown them out. Then I looked in the file drawer and realized I had only done half of them.

I sighed and shut the drawer.

Time to move on to other things because I was definitely through shredding files. When I shuffle off this mortal coil, my daughter will be the lucky recipient of all these files. She can do whatever she wants with them because happily, I will no longer care about identity theft or anything else.

7 I will say that going through those tax return files as I did was like sitting in a time machine. It was so great to relive the moments when I bought my first house.

I was working in an office and making fairly good money, but Uncle Sam was taking more of it than I would have liked, so I asked my tax lady what to do.

She said, “Buy a house and live in it. Then you will have a deduction!” So that’s what I did, and I learned a lot about buying a house.

In the 1980s, I got a commission from a local construction company, and I painted a mural on two of their office walls.

They paid me $800 for the job, which, at the time, I thought was a fortune.

The mural was a huge job, and took me a month. I should have asked for twice the amount, but who knew?

It was a learning experience, and of course, I listed it on my tax return as income. It was fun to think of it again.

I strolled down memory lane as I shredded each file.

The rest of the files in my old filing cabinet pertain to the selling of my mom’s house after she died (which was 20 years ago) and other files that I can’t bear to throw out.

My daughter will have the joy of throwing all these files into a dumpster when the time comes. I am glad I won’t be around to protest.