Jaxes Taxes

Early-year tax reminder 🧭🗓️

• Some tax decisions can still be addressed after the year ends, but others are permanently locked in by what actually happened. Filing a return doesn’t change the facts—it just reveals them 🧠📜

• Review retirement and health account contributions for the prior year (IRA, Roth IRA, SEP-IRA, Solo 401(k) employer contributions, HSA). You may need to correct excess contributions or may still be eligible to make additional prior-year contributions that reduce tax owed 🪙⏳

• If you moved money into or out of an entity you own, those transfers must be treated as loans or capital contributions. In some cases the facts allow either treatment, and the final classification is locked in when the return is filed—but documentation and reality still control 🧩📂

• Personal expenses can’t be turned into deductible expenses after the fact. Deductibility depends on the purpose of the expense at the time it was paid or incurred 🛑🎭

• Deductions require real payments and real activity. You can’t backdate payments, create expenses without payment, or re-label transfers later and expect the tax result to hold 🧱⚠️

• Recordkeeping matters. Some deductions require documentation created at or near the time of the activity. For vehicle expenses, mileage and the business purpose must be tracked contemporaneously 🚙📍🗒️ If tracking was inconsistent last year, now is the right time to fix it going forward.

• If you own a business, confirm required W-2s and 1099s are prepared and filed on time to avoid penalties and delays 📠🧾⌛

Early review now usually prevents bigger problems later 🧯🌱

Jaxes Taxes

You don’t realize you’re barefoot until the ground bites you.

I grew up in county farmlands. Once when I was a teenager at a block party, we saw water shooting straight into the air from our property.

My dad looked at me and said, “Go turn off the water.” A simple command.

I didn’t think. I just kicked off my oversized skater shoes and ran.

Down the road. Through the gate. And straight into a patch of goatheads that I didn’t even know existed and had never considered could have existed.

I dropped instantly, pain taking my breath and my body reacted by instinct. But when I caught myself, the thorns drove into the sensitive flesh of my palms too.

Panic set in. Every move meant more needles. There was no clean path forward, but the spout was on the other side.

I knelt and the needles dug into my knees. I picked the thorns from my hands, dozens of pinpricks of blood welling up. I looked around, but the ground was covered for yards with the thorns.

I cursed, but I forced my way through. I bitterly shut off the water, and walked back leaving bloodied footprints into the house.

That was one of the first times the world corrected me without explanation and I heard loud and clear.

For a long time after, I thought the pain meant I was careless or weak. I didn’t understand that something else had changed. The thin layer between me and reality was gone when I kicked off my shoes.

That’s what happens in business.

When you start out as an employee, you run with confidence, urgency, good intentions. For a while, inherited structures protect you. Employers. Corporations. Systems you didn’t build.

When you abandon those structures to build your own business, reality doesn’t care. It will bite you at the first chance it gets.

The goatheads were always there. My shoes had hidden them from me and I never had even known that I didn’t know that kind of pain.

Jaxes Taxes

Have you ever thought: “Is the universe personally invested in watching me fail… or am I just this bad at basic living?”

At seventeen, that was not a joke. It felt like a diagnosis.
Everything in my life had collapsed at once:

Failing classes I should have passed.
Getting kicked out of programs I was supposed to thrive in.
Being forced to graduate early.
Believing that college wasn’t an option anymore.
Losing control to addictions I’d fought for years.
Suffering social rejection.
Looking at my future and seeing nothing but static.

During the summer of 2014, after youth event, when darkness had descended, I walked among half-renovated dorms on a college campus; bare beams, pallets of material, a construction site slept for the night.
And I sat alone on a pile of gravel, looking up at the darkness above and the full moon rising.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t just feel failure – I felt the collision between my actions and a world that has rules I hadn’t bothered to understand.

I now know the questions that I didn’t have the words for then:
“What did I think was going to happen?”
“What do other people know that I clearly don’t?”
“What part of reality have I been refusing to learn?”
“Where is the gap between who I am and the world I’m colliding with?”

I have since realized these truths:
The world wasn’t the villain.
I, this undefined youth, wasn't the villain, either.

The problem was the contact point –
me trying to move through a structured world without understanding its structure. It was my own ignorance and vision.

When did you first realize that life is complex and that you aren’t the problem?
That you were in fact breaking as you came up against the rules of a world you didn’t yet understand?