(deafening silence. hard stare.)
Sincerely, me.
~
This morning, I discovered that Chris's W-2 was available online, so I printed it out and thought I'd try to get a start on our taxes. I normally like doing taxes. Something about plowing through the instructions and actually understanding them and filling in all those blanks... But this year? Things are getting more complicated. I got the hang of doing taxes for service-oriented work. Now we have this e-bay thing, and I'm not sure how to handle it. A little research is required before I dive into that.
So, for fun, I thought I'd tackle the Schedule F. "F" stands for "farm." I think. I don't know for sure, since it doesn't really say that anywhere in the instructions, but that would make sense. That might be the only thing that makes sense in our current tax code, but I digress. Anyway, I realize that I probably don't need to fill out a Schedule F, since my egg sales this year amount to about as much as a kid's lemonade stand, but what the heck, I'll have to do it in the years to come, so why not get my feet wet?
It all seemed fairly straight forward until I came across this in the Schedule F instructions:
"Do not deduct the following...
Expenses of raising anything you or your family used. "
Okay. I get the concept of keeping business expenses separate from personal ones, but as we all know, that can get complicated- especially on a small farm. So what, am I supposed to keep a personal egg-providing chicken separate from the rest of the chickens I have and buy it separate feed? Or maybe I could figure up the ratio of eggs we use to the eggs we sell and use that to calculate the percentage of feed costs I am allowed to deduct. But wait a minute... What about the poo? I use chicken poo in the garden- which is strictly for personal use at this point. Oh, this is getting tricky. How in the world am I going to figure all this out?
The IRS has a help line... I may call it and ask some unsuspecting soul a few questions.
(heh, heh.)
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