Depression and taxes

I have, elsewhere, noted that just keeping on going, persistence, tenacity, or just putting one foot in front of the other, is one way to deal with depression.  Myself, I developed this method of addressing depression based on Martin Seligman's theory of "learned helplessness" as a possible origin for depression.  Learned helplessness noted that forcing depressed subjects to succeed, or even appear to succeed, was a way to address and possibly alieviate depression.  (This is, problematically, somewhat at odds with one of my primary ideas about depression.  A lot of people keep asking what I am depressed about, to which I tend to reply that if you are depressed *about* something, you are not depressed, you are reacting rationally to external circumstances.)  (But I digress.)

So, I have kept doing it.  For various, and generally small, values of "it."  One of the things that I haven't been able to face, for eight months, is income taxes, the season for which started about the time my depression hit.  Last year's taxes were emotionally fraught, as an extension of the accounting which I found surprisingly emotionally fraught.

To give you the full flavour of how minor a victory this is, I have to note that I have done my own taxes for fifty years.  I did Gloria's taxes, the whole time that we were married.  Last year's emotional freighting of income tax was partly because I was doing Gloria's final income tax.  And I did it.  I did my first income tax when I was seventeen. And, on that occasion, I had to fill out the taxes as if I owned my own business, since the company that employed me, at the time, had seriously messed me about, by putting on to my T4 slip the sum total of every penny of every cheque that they had paid me, including those when they were repaying me, for purchases that I had made, at their request, on their behalf.  When you fill out the tax forms for your own business, when you have never had a business, normal taxes don't frighten you very much.  For most of the last thirty years I have also had to fill out my taxes as a small business, or for professional services.  The Canadian government has made strenuous efforts to ensure that filling out your own taxes got progressively more complicated.  On a couple of occasions I went quite a while without contracts.  I tell people that I've retired twice, and neither time did it take.  But, yes, on at least two occasions I filled out the tax forms, listing only pension income, and interest income from the bank accounts.  On both of those occasions it took longer to fill out the tax forms then it did when I was seventeen, and filling out forms as if I owned my own business.

So, I am not afraid of taxes as such.  I believe in funding the government, and government programs that benefit me.  And I know that it would be ridiculous to try and account for who uses a lot of the government benefits, because doing the accounting to track that would cost more than providing the actual services.  So I don't mind paying my income tax.  The income tax that I am due to pay.

The thing about depression is, you are depressed.  When medical people use the term depressed, they are generally talking about bodily functions that aren't working as they are supposed to.  Such and such a function is depressed means that it isn't producing what it is supposed to produce on a regular basis.  So, just at the time when all the tax forms were supposed to arrive is not the time to get depressed.  Generally depressed, meaning that every function is depressed.  Your energy is depressed.  Your motivation is depressed.  Your concentration is depressed.  Your rationality is depressed.  Just at the time when you need all systems firing at full capacity to chase down all the various forms, and the forms from the government, which they no longer send you automatically, plus the forms that your bank claims that they have sent you, but haven't sent you, because they mailed them, and they have never corrected your postal code, so the post office never delivered them.

I have been worried about not filling out my income tax.  You're supposed to fill out the income tax, even if you weren't supposed to pay very much, if anything.  Which is my usual state.  I don't usually have an awful lot of income tax to pay, because I'm not very rich, and I don't make very much money.  (I am rather bitterly amused by the continual stories of how companies are unable to hire security personnel, because they cannot find any qualified security personnel. Having worked in the field for almost forty years, and having, for more than twenty years, taught my younger colleagues how to increase their skills, and broaden their breadth of scope in the field, I have kept track of pieces of information that would justify these assertions of a lack of security personnel.  My students have not had an increasingly easier time finding high paying jobs.  The jobs that I, myself, apply for aren't having salaries firing through the roof.  No, Virginia, there is no shortage of security personnel.  There are just companies who want to winge and complain, and pay minimum salary level wages for professional services.)

At any rate, thanks to help from the girls, I was able to find an accountancy firm that was willing to do my taxes, for a not-sky-high fee.  This, the hiring of a firm to do my taxes, was something new in my experience.  I have never had to hire anyone to fill out my taxes.  I have always done it myself.  I have never used software, to fill out my taxes.  (Or, rather, I have tried several times, with various pieces of software, none of which filled the bill.  Some couldn't handle professional income.  Some couldn't handle medical expenses.  Some couldn't handle charitable donations.  Some couldn't handle RRSP contributions, for crying out loud!)  At any rate, the girls found me a firm, and the firm has, in very short order, done my taxes.  As far as I can tell they have done them correctly.  I don't really have the energy, or the concentration, to go through and double check absolutely every line of multiple pages of forms.  But I have spot checked, and it doesn't seem unreasonable.

Of course, even getting someone else to do your taxes, means getting various forms, from various places.  The accountancy is familiar with basic taxes and had me fill out a representation agreement with CRA which got them access to the forms regarding my pension.  And, presumably, the basic forms regarding my investments.  But I still had to get them copies of other forms from SW, which SW had never delivered, and has not been terribly efficient about delivering.  The manager of the local bank branch has been much more helpful, even though SW is supposed to be the office that I deal with.

However, SW has not been terribly useful over the years.  SW got me to switch over to them, at a very vulnerable time in my life, immediately after Gloria had died.  They fed me a sales pitch, two parts of which were particularly appealing at that point in time, just after I had filled out Gloria's final income tax: that of a promise of assistance with income taxes, and the promise that I could write off their fees banking fees brokerage fees and other investment fees, which I couldn't do with the investments that I had with the bank itself.  This turns out to be a crock.

My first Portfolio Manager was a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and a Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA).  In the first six months I was with SW, my investments lost a quarter of their value.  Just at the time I need to cash out in order to complete the house purchase.  Which they knew about.

For another thing, it turns out that SW provides you with absolutely no assistance in dealing with taxes, other than charging you fees, which you can write off against your income tax, if you know has to do that.  Which, of course, I didn't.  And, it turns out that you cannot write off all of the fees: only those fees for non-registered accounts.  Just about all of my savings is in registered accounts.  So, rather than being able to write off $10,000, I was able to write off only a bit more than a mingy $600.  And how do you do that?  Well, I don't know.  SW promised that they were going to send me instructions on how to do that, but they never did.