All working professionals other than accountants and finance guys hate to deal with tax filing and keep postponing doing their homework until the last minute. Working out your tax liability and filling up the form need not be a major hassle, as long as you have a system in place and follow it with required discipline.
You do not have to keep saving bits of paper and receipts. All you need to do is to itemize your medical purchases and keeping track of all prescriptions will not be necessary.
It is very simple. Go to your pharmacist and ask him to give you a print out of all the prescription receipts under your name for the entire year and do this for all members of your family and in no time you have the entire list of your annual medical expenditure ready.
Have you stopped tracking your vehicle mileage, yes it can be quite cumbersome to note down every time you go on a official trip or go for a party. Well you may want to look at the following options to make your work easy.
You may be noting down all your appointments on your calendar or planner in your system. End of the year spend an hour at the most and take a listing and estimate the mileage with the help of GPS.
It may be easier to print out the list on monthly basis too if you prefer. If you are a techie, it may be still easier for you. All you need to do is to download the applications like Mile bug on your iphone and start using it to track your mileage. It costs only 3.99$
Yes your tax man will confirm that you need to keep all the papers and supporting bills for a period of 7 years least you be called to produce them during an audit. There are ways in which this can be done easily.
All you need to do is to buy seven self-expanding ply folders or wallets and label them for each year. Now you may store each years papers in the particular folder and end of the year, take out the papers as well as the label from the year that is no longer required and is more than 7 years old and ensure you destroy all papers. Now you can re label the folder with current year label and re use it.