I am starting to think that having an accountant should be like having a family doctor. Accountants should know your whole financial history and have a file on you so that you can streamline a lot of questioning. Which means you should begin a relationship with a trusted accountant early on in your professional life.
Easier said than done.
I had this epiphany recently after a rather adverse experience with an H&R Block accountant. Is it part of their job description to make you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing with your money? Sir/Madam- you should already know and expect that to be true. If I did, I wouldn’t be sitting there in that cubicle with you; I’d be doing my taxes myself. It’s always better to just Turbo it, in my mind. Less embarrassment related to how much money you didn’t make, how much money you don’t have saved. It really is a shame they don’t make accounting a required high school course. Two-column proofs and Pythagorean theorems haven’t been worth a damn in the real world.
Hitting the gym regularly has been a far more rewarding experience than doing taxes. Nothing like working out with the Shawnee High School track and field team in 2005, as it turns out. I didn’t realize how many psychological scars I had from doing high school sports until I started lifting weights again. For a good couple weeks all these memories came back to me of getting yelled at by high school teachers who thought they were coaches.
I don’t know how we did it. Out of bed by 6am, in school by 7. And then after navigating through a bunch of highly caffeinated teachers with wildly different moods, some more temperamental than those of their students, go get humiliated by a handful of angry balding men in sweatpants. From an emotional standpoint, life is probably easier now in my thirties than it was at 16. I’ll take a patronizing accountant over high school track coaches any day.
