Keeping on Going, Even When you Feel Exhausted!

Many years ago I had a retail shop. It was actually a store we started from the ground up after college, and so we not only had a retail store we started one, from the ground up.

One of the things about actually opening it was the fact that we did everything by ourselves. And that turned out to be more work than we could possibly have imagined, as almost everything took longer than expected. This also meant that we got to experience times in which we were absolutely exhausted, but stopping was out of the question because we had deadlines.

While that all happened many many years ago, there have been plenty of times since then when I felt a similar sense of exhaustion. In fact, I'm feeling a bit of it, at the moment.

Sometimes I find myself wondering why exactly we work so hard. The only reasonable answer I can come up with is that we create these situations in which if we stop we are doomed to failure, and the only way we are not doomed to failure is if we keep moving!

You might be thinking that's not much of a life, but it's often how self-employed people go through their existence.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I've been working on our personal income tax return. I just finished that yesterday; the process took approximately 9 or 10 days in all, once you count all the bookkeeping that went behind each number that had to go down on the government form.

At this point there's nothing I'd like more than to just lay down and rest for a week, but tomorrow I start work on a different set of government forms and applications that have to do with claiming at least a partial exemption on our property taxes because I managed to reach the age of 61 last year.

Being 61 means I now qualify for certain "old age pensioner" type benefits, and I am trying to take advantage of those to the best of my ability. I am definitely not one of those people who is "too proud" to admit that they need help!

As a Danish national here in the USA, one of the things I've learned about living in this country is that whereas this is definitely not a "welfare state," there are actually quite a few helpful programs available to people who are struggling financially — you just have to jump through whole bunch of hoops to get them, if you can even find out whether they exist or not!

I'm not sure exactly how much help we will get as a result of me filling out these applications. There are a lot of classifications in the paperwork that I don't fully understand, but as best I can tell we might be able to get our property taxes reduced by about $1000 a year!

And no, it doesn't feel like I'm "mooching off the government…" these abatements for senior citizens are essentially based on the idea that we don't have kids at our age, and they're not using the schools, so therefore we become exempt from paying the "school taxes" part of our property tax assessment.

Anyway I start figuring that all out tomorrow, and I just hope it works out... we can use all the help we ca get!

Thanks for reading and have a great remainder of your week!

How about YOU? Are you a homeowner? Are the taxes on properties expensive where you are? Do you sometimes feel exhausted by what it takes to keep up with everything? Do leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

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Created at 20220215 00:22 PST
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