Ignorance is Bliss
Facebook memory writing prompt 7
Just occurred to me that we are supposed to be in bali right now. Amazing part is I’d rather be here doing what we’re doing — decorating for Halloween
Alright, I was obviously high from breathing too much fresh air to have ever made this statement. Don’t get me wrong, I was then, and still am happy to be living in the land of the free, but another trip to Bali right about now would certainly trump decorating for Halloween…which is on the to-do list, but to the chagrin of my brood, not a priority.
In some ways the novelty of living in the states has worn off, just like the novelty of living in China wore off after a while. Life is life no matter where you sleep. And fuck, sometimes it really is hard. The benefit of life in China: we traveled. The benefit of life in the states (aside from fresh air): we get to see our families. I wish we could have some sort of hybrid arrangement.
The little ditty I’m about to relay will probably garner some eye rolls. Some may roll their eyes and chalk it up to 1st world/rich white people problems. To you I say, fuck off. I am white. I am not rich in the American sense of the word, but I am rich in the 3rd world sense of the world. I’m not going to apologize for winning the “born in the USA” lottery.
Others may roll their eyes and chalk it up to us bumblefucking our way through life. The devil’s in the details. Well, I say fuck off to you too. You try living in a foreign country where you can’t even decode the language if you wanted to…and working for a company that, well, did absolutely nothing to support us…even when we were evicted from our home, in the middle of winter, two kids with pneumonia and my grandfather and grandmother just died. Or the time that asshole ninja broke into our house and assaulted me 10 days before I gave birth to twin girls in this foreign fucking land.
On to the story of our life as it is unfolding as I type this…
So, I remember when we first moved to Shanghai some serial expat telling me about their tax issues. Because it is complicated. It’s so complicated that, fortunately one thing his worthless company did do for us was our taxes…rather they hired one of the big 5 accounting firms to do our taxes. Great. So, he filled out the forms online every year and they did what they do and we carried on with life.
At some point in our 6 years abroad somebody figured out that we hadn’t actually been filing our taxes. Cue eye roll. Apparently there was a third step in the process. We fill out form. They sprinkle accounting fairy dust. Then we were supposed to sign something and send it to the IRS…hence the term “filing your taxes”. Oops.
Well fuck. We get our lawyer involved (who happens to be my father-in-law) and he sorts some shit out with the IRS and we move forward always remembering to sign and send the form…file our taxes.
FFW to our repatriation. Well, it’s been such a fucking nightmare I don’t even know where to start. We’ve had 3 major run-ins with the IRS. I’ll try to be brief.
- We used to live in Colorado. We have a house there. The company we moved to China with was acquired by a company HQ in North Carolina. For some reason, the new company never filed our CO state income taxes. They filed our state income taxes in NC. That ended up being a massive cluster fuck that seems to have been sorted.
- One day last spring I was sitting on my porch with my dog drinking green tea and reading a book. So nice. Rob calls, tells me our bank account has been drained…2 mortgage checks bounce and a couple of other minor issues. There is a phone number to call…I google it: IRS. Yes. So, the IRS froze our assets because we haven’t paid taxes we didn’t know we owed. Here’s the kicker. Remember we used to live in CO? We have a house with some nice renters who pay our mortgage for us. Remember we’ve been filing our state income taxes since 2007 in NC (and the year 2013 taxes were filed with an actual address in NC). For some reason, the IRS sends not one but two certified letters to our address in CO telling us we owe them A LOT of fucking money. Because we didn’t reply, because we never got the letters because we live in NC the IRS froze our assets. This issue, as far as I know, has also been resolved.
- Because of the tax cluster fuck last spring, we filed for an extension for 2014 taxes…sometime in May or June #2 above is sorted and we are now ready to do our 2014 return. This, btw, is the first time we’ve had to do our taxes since moving abroad in ‘07. We download the software, plug in the numbers and BAM we are getting 11k back…somehow having four kids really does pay. Within a half an hour I have spent that money in my imagination. Some time last week we got a letter from NC IRS telling us that they are withholding our $500 state return. huh? The next day we get a letter from the big boys telling us they are withholding our federal return. Why? They are going to apply it to past taxes…again, we didn’t know we owed.
I have faith that the good people at Deloitte will work their magic and get it all sorted out…again. I certainly hope so because we are ass deep in a bathroom renovation that was to be paid for with, you guessed it, our tax return.
Shouldn’t there be an easier way? I will fight the urge to get political. Instead, I will scroll through my pictures of Bali and remember a time when we were blissfully ignorant of our 1st world problems while soaking up every ounce of beauty of a most magical 3rd world country.
