Sunday, April 15, 2012

5 Little Known Genealogy Tax Deductions

Here in the States, it's tax time. But before you send all your money to Uncle Sam, see if you qualify for any of these little known genealogy tax deductions:

1. Deduct $50 per instance of government incompetence inhibiting your process of getting a county record (max $300). Clerk with an attitude, missing volume, and stupid access rules all qualify, but you must document each occurrence with a venting blog post. 

2. Deduct $25 for each full hour of work time you've spent deleting "the definition of professionalism" threads of APG list emails from your inbox. 

3. Receive a $100 sanity credit for your valiant attempts in 2011 to reassure the public and semi-competent media outlets that genealogists aren't out to steal anyone's identities.

4. Deduct 5% of a conference registration fee for each session billed as general genealogy education, but in reality is just a chance for a vendor/speaker to sell products. 

5. Receive a $50 credit for each time in 2011 you had to explain to your friends and/or family that you're into GENEALOGY, not GYNECOLOGY. 




17 comments:

  1. Love it, Amy! Hilarious! If only these deductions and credits were real! I'm about to test #1 on a road trip tomorrow - stopping in Robertson County on my way to TLA!

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    1. I wish you much success and happy clerks in the courthouse. Have a safe trip to Houston.

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  2. Thanks for the laugh in the midst of tax preparation!

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  3. You got me with this one.

    Reading the title I thought there might be something I could apply to tax preparation in Australia. Little did I expect the laughs it gave me.

    Number 4 is one of my pet peeves. I think you have been rather generous. If it's an all day conference with 8 speakers and two give sn infomercial I think you should get a 25%.

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    1. Looks like you and I have spotted the same trend.

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  4. Oh boy... my refund just got a LOT bigger... (Laughing out loud at these...)

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  5. This is another great post from Amy. Thanks so much for your classic and always enlightening humor.

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    1. Thank you for the kind words, Susan. This is what happens when I can't sleep. I wrote notes in the dark and turned them into a blog post in the morning.

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  6. Deduct half of the cost of subscription sites with sucky search engines and few helpful records.

    documenting with a blog post sounds good!

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  7. Ha ha! This is great. Thanks for the laugh Amy!

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  8. Haha, thanks for this! I just finished my taxes and certainly needed the laugh.

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