Check is in the bank

My property manager called last night, the first of the month. The new renters has finished dropping of all the money they are supposed to give before moving in. The property manager will deposit it in her bank then deposit it into my bank after she takes her fees out. That arrangement works for me. If a check bounces it is in her bank to deal with not mine.

I am waiting for my final electric and water bill. I am to send it to the property manager for her to submit to the tenants for reimbursement. They are going to pay for the time they were in the house which was pretty much the whole month, with painting and moving in early. The wife admitted to setting up babysitting evenings during the month, with her children so the children would be comfortable with their new spaces. I did the same thing when my boys were little and we were buying a house. I would set up visits to the house through the real estate agent, or have picnics in the back yard if we couldn't get the appointment, while we waited for closing. It was a vacant house. I am going to read it as a good sign that they love the house.

I had already turned off the heat for February, so the tenants had to turn the heat back on in their names in order to get the house warm enough to paint. The other bills we will be reimbursed. All is good.

I hope these tenants will buy it in a year or two as they said they wanted. If not, it goes back on the market and they move out inconveniently. I am hoping that is their incentive. No one likes to move.

We moved out in 2011 turning the house into a rental. We have within five years to sell it from that date. By 2016 we hope to have the rental gone. The dilemma is do we depreciate. If we depreciate we have to pay capital gains on the depreciated amount when we sell. I am going to ask Tom to run the numbers. Knowing we don't plan on holding on to the house, we may want to waive that option. It might be worth our while to talk to a CPA. What ever we sell the house for will probably go totally into paying off the new loan. Break even in two years or get it out of the sale price.

Tom says I can put him in a nursing home if we can't figure this kind of stuff out for ourselves. There are plenty of programs available to spoon feed you through your taxes, if you want to take the time to enter it all yourself. Tom grouses around but likes the control of doing it himself. We have even done the years when we moved for work. It takes hours and a lot of crankiness, but he gets it done.

One year Tom couldn't enter the cost basis on some stocks. The computer program baulked. We received a letter two years later saying w owed taxes. He submitted the waiting figures manually to the IRS. We finally received the official notice that we don't owe any back taxes for the year 2009. He knew we were in the clear, so he didn't rush around to get it done in any hurry, but it added stress to my life. I had to get cranky.

There was also the time when the program tried to stop Tom from doing IRA contributions for us, because for two months of the year he had been part of a 401K. You can't do both 401k and IRA in the same year. He circumvented the program, and we later had to treat the IRA amount as income and take the contributions back. It is not perfect doing it ourselves.

What made me cranky was doing my Dad's Estate. There was no program for the DIYer to use. I was forced to use tax specialists. When they were done with the paperwork they refused to guarantee their work. I was out of time as taxes were due shortly. I didn't have time to go elsewhere as they had taken weeks to get everything finished. I paid and submitted their work. Two years later I received a letter. Something had been missed. I would rather have done it myself, mistakes and all, rather than pay someone to make mistakes for me.

Tom has the right of it, if you are willing to do the time, make the tedious entries. It is very doable on these new programs, on line for a nominal fee. We are about to pull up our britches and attack our records again for another year. Now we have health insurance and expenses, and a rental to add to the mix of self employed. It's going to be fun. I bought a really good expensive bottle of wine at the beach and hid it. We will open this lovely bottle of wine to celebrate our accomplishments once we are finished, and to apologize to each other for the bickering that comes with sorting our tax papers and doing this tedious chore ourselves.

I am still twitching from the not so smooth transition of new loan and new renters. But in a couple of months I will hopefully feel quite comfortable as the flow of money from one party to another proves worth the stress and effort.