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On April 15th taxes are due. If you are a independent contractor or run a small business the 1st quarterly payments are due as well. Where is one to find all that money! Well if you’ve been planning last year paying 2009 taxes shouldn’t be a problem. You should have been saving also for the 1st quarterly payment of the year as well.

Honestly I don’t think too many people do either. I know last year was the first time I really planned for my upcoming taxes. I finally found an accountant after years of doing my taxes myself. They were just getting to complicated and tiresome to do.

I decided to do as much research as possible to make sure 1) I didn’t owe that much in taxes to Uncle Sam and 2) that I really understood where my money was going. Income is easy to track. Who doesn’t like getting money?

But keeping track of receipts and all the other crap that goes along with being financially responsible can be a pain in the ass.

The first thing I did was setup a system to track my expenses and income. To do that I used both Mint.com and Outright.com. I also read Self-Employed Tax Solutions by June Walker to make sure I understood what I needed to track. I linked my Freshbooks invoicing account to Outright.com so I’d know when I got paid and also if I was making a profit or not. Important to know for any business that plans to be around any length of time. I even signed up for a Shoeboxed.com account to track my online purchases. Those were the expenses I tended to forget about. But with my Shoebox account I could keep up with it all. And that frankly was all I cared about. Simplifying my life.

So did all that planning work?

Totally! I went to my new accountant this week. My taxes are done and I’m a lot less stressed out than I was last year.