Prayer that my minimizing might help others

Have you ever reached that point that you realized that you were working like crazy and getting behinder by the minute?  Have you reached that point of having four or five quilt tops that are ready to be sandwiched and quilted but no funds to pay someone else to quilt them?  Or realized that you don't have anyone that really needs them?

Or have you heard the word MINIMALIST so many times that it's starting to wear on you about how much you AREN'T living that reality?

Or maybe TAX time slaps you in the face and you realize that later is now?

That happened here.

So my frenzied reaction to having a federal tax bill is this:

And you are saying, "HUH?"

But some of you may recognize this as a small, comfort sized quilt.  This one is actually going to somebody my friend knows, but I have a duplicate headed to the Ronald McDonald House.  

How is that going to help?

Simple.  It's a tax write off using fabric I already own, already bought.  You know, the stuff you have had so long that it feels like it was free?  (Thank you, IRS, that's only a figure of speech, but I didn't buy it recently.  It has been sitting on my shelf for at least a year with no landing place in mind.)

When I figured out our taxes this year, I became more and more tense because our usual write offs were disappearing.  And my brief foray into the land of reporting to someone else's workplace for a paycheck resulted in an additional $200 tax (on less than a month's and not a whole lot of money worth of effort.)  With that paycheck, my husband flew out to see his parents and our daughter--both necessary adventures so I have no regrets.  At least until I prepared our taxes with Turbo Tax's help. 

But the pain began much earlier than inputting my W-2.  

You see, my daughter moved to college last fall.  And became self supporting.  So we lost half of her support deduction.

She's our youngest so this pain started several years ago when my boys turned 17.  They're 22 now.  At 17, the automatic child exemption stops, but you can still keep them as dependents for tax purposes as long as you are still supporting them and they don't make more than a bare minimum.  So we haven't been able to claim them since they were about 18.  

Our daughter just turned 19 and our fun was over.

Maybe you can relate?  Or dread?

I only made two charitable, in kind donations last year, and I savored both of them.  Between our tithing, other cash donations, and those TWO in-kind donations of household goods and clothing, we didn't have to come up with THOUSANDS in federal tax.  

This year I hit the ground running on this whole minimalist idea.  Our bookcases are emptying because books make a really good donation.  So far I've donated 4 boxes of books with 3 more boxes sitting on the floor behind me.  I haven't even gotten to the point that I can put all of our books into the bookcases we'll take with us when we downsize our home, let alone move into a tiny house!

THAT is painful!  Books are my life, my freedom, and my education.  They're my defense against our society's soul destroying effort to rewrite our country's history, the good, the bad, the ugly.  Because it ALL made us who we are today.  Maybe especially the ugly.  Without remembering the ugly, we might become even uglier.  With those memories, we can become more kind.  Without them, we might cycle back around to become more cynical, more proud, and more prejudiced.

All this makes slimming down my book collection painful.

So is slimming down my fabric collection.  Both, however, can be put back into circulation to enrich another generation.  Children who have medical troubles and children and adults who need to learn time-honored values may hopefully benefit from my efforts.