Today, I got around to filing my taxes. That wasn’t very exciting, or profitable, and it took more time than I wanted. After filing them, I didn’t really do anything else. Today was another day of very little money-making.

I wasn’t looking forward to filing my taxes. I never am, but this was going to be worse. Even though I only had 1 job all year, I tried this whole online money making thing before.

I worked for the client I have now and a second client last year. Those were straight contractor payments with no taxes withheld making taxes suck hardcore.

Both clients started in the last quarter of last year and really didn’t last that long. I didn’t have money flooding in, but I did make enough that guaranteed I wouldn’t be getting a refund.

On the other hand, I was a little relieved to finally get this out of the way. I have one friend, who had a better set up than me, who worked as a contractor for over a year. He does the thing where he “withholds” the money from himself.

That makes it so that the money in the tax account is destined to go to the IRS, but the money in his other account is basically his without restriction. Come tax time, if he can pay his taxes and have money left over in the tax account, he is essentially giving himself a tax refund.

I, however, didn’t do that. I kept all the money in one account. That meant that I knew part of the money wasn’t really mine and would go to the IRS, but I didn’t know how much of it would be going.

Paying the tax meant I could finally get an idea of how much money I really had….sort of. Technically, money that will go towards this year’s tax is also in the account. But I have about a year before I have to worry about that.