Adulting is hard

….all of a sudden you look around and you are on your own. You have to juggle work, possibly school, taxes, rent, credit card payments, phone bills..etc. You then realize adulting kinda sucks, nothing has prepared you for the life lessons you actually need.

That’s where I come in…

I am here to help make adulting a little easier:

1.Taxes: Now I am the first to tell you I do not know everything about taxes. There are many options when it comes to doing your taxes, you can do it yourself, use an online service like turbo tax, wealth simple, etc, you can even go to places like H&R block or use an accounting firm. No matter how you decide to do your taxes, make sure you 1 do your taxes every year and 2. you are aware if you get a refund or if you have to pay and make sure you do PAY.

It is especially important if you are living with a spouse, if you get a refund it is completely up to you if that money gets used to pay down the taxes your spouse owes or if you get to keep it. I have seen it to many times where spouse number 1 takes care of all of the finances and one day they get a divorce and spouse number 2 finds out that the thousands of dollars of refunds that spouse number 2 should have been getting back from the government spouse number 1 was using so they didn’t have to pay as much in taxes.

In Canada, you have the option to pay you taxes in payments instead of a lump sum, while this could be a great option for you, make sure you are aware of any interest charges that follow and if you are looking at getting a mortgage all of your taxes have to be paid up to date BEFORE you move into your new house.

If you are business for self make sure to either prepay your taxes with monthly payments (if you over pay you will receive a refund at the end of the year) or have a separate bank account for your taxes so you don’t even look at that money. Then when tax season comes in May you already have the money set aside.

2. Credit Card Payments- If you are anything like myself you live an extremely busy life. Paying off your credit card is usually the first thing I forget. So I have set up my credit card’s to do an automatic payment. You can either set it up to pay off the minimum payment or you can set it up to pay off the entire balance. That way you don’t have to remember to make any payments, or even worse pay off interest charges on missed payments, as that will show on your credit report.