Adulting 101: Taxes

Back in March, I had a long soliloquy of the year that has passed: both wins and challenges. When I decided to leave being employed full-time, I knew that we’d have to also change our status from employed to self-employed in BIR, and file our taxes accordingly based from this.

We gave ourselves a deadline that by June, we had to finish this. And finished, we did.

I personally spent weeks researching about this. We knew that we’d rather do the registration ourselves because, well, DIY-ing is life. It is also always better to know the process so we are not caught off guard and we minimize surprises. We originally intended to hire someone to do it in our behalf, but we eventually opted otherwise as that’d still a couple of thousand of pesos. Yikes.

We had been longtime employees and these matters had been usually taken care for us by our respective HRs.

As for the registration itself, BIR has been championing since lockdown for new businesses, freelancers, etc. to take advantage of the online registration via the NewBizReg portal. We almost proceeded with this as it was reportedly a streamlined way of registering. (They also have an online appointment system, by the way).

On the other hand, we’ve read mixed feedback online on how fast they process such applications. Granted we’ll have ours in Makati, which in our opinion more adaptive to new technologies/processes, we still decided to personally do it.

A bunch of paperworks- registration, receipts, and books

The result is a bunch of paperworks: Certificate of Registration (COR), BIR-printed receipts, and Books of Accounts (Had to watermark this aggressively as my Pag-Ibig check from a post in 2013 was stolen by other websites — it even had my name on those posts).

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It is already March 2022

It has been more than a year and 1 month since I last posted. Where was I the whole time?

This blog will be turning 10 this June, when I have first written this entry back in June 1, 2012. But I also have a still active Tumblr page last time I’ve checked, which I first opened when I turned 25. I am turning 37 this year, and I am still here, albeit writing sparingly.

Proof of Life 2022

Unfiltered proof of life 2022: if there is one thing I have learned in the last few months, it was moisturizing. I knew at one point all those all-nighters will catch up on me. >o<

So where do we start?

Twenty twenty-one had been a pivotal year for me. I had never been more adult than the year that was. Remember my house in the uplands which I last visited in January 2013? It took about 6 years until the 4th quarter of 2019 for me to visit again the property, which had expectedly seen a state of neglect.

I was determined to start being serious with it again by that time, but the pandemic hit. Everything was put to a stop. It took until March 2021 for me to get the ball rolling with the renovation of the property because of Ulysses from November 2020.

That whole renovation process and the successful full payment of my Pag-Ibig loan (19 years and 10 months ahead of the maturity date) deserve their own post, so I’ll just share this before and after:

Our townhouse - before and after

Our townhouse: before from March 2021, and after from August 21, 2021. Notice I even had to spraypaint my name by the door because there were several people reportedly claiming the property when I neglected it. Good thing there were no trespassers.

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