It Was Never Ours
The bill that arrives before you have spent a dollar.
"Pay the taxes the week the money lands, because that money was never yours in the first place."
Meet Daniella. She sold her company and did what almost everyone does with a tax bill that isn't due for a year: she waited.
After we sold our company, the proceeds landed in our bank account with nothing held back. A lottery win gets taxed before the winner ever sees a dime. A company sale doesn't. The taxes were our problem, and they weren't due for almost a year, so we did the completely normal thing with them: nothing.
Everyone we trusted told us the same thing: park it in a high-yield savings account and let it earn a little interest while you wait. Reasonable. Responsible, even. So that's what we did. And as the months went by, I kept catching myself checking the balance on my phone, at the kitchen table, in line at the grocery store, and every time, the money set aside for taxes felt a little more like ours.
A year is a long time to stare at a number and not start treating it like yours.
Then tax season came. Writing that enormous check to the IRS didn't feel like paying a bill. It felt like being robbed. My husband kept reminding me that we'd always known it was owed, and he was right, and it didn't help. That money was always theirs. But it never felt that way, and I carried the sting of it for weeks.
Here's what I didn't understand. The mistake wasn't on a spreadsheet. Sitting in our account for a year, the tax money got mixed into my sense of what we had. My brain claimed it. And parting with money your brain has claimed is the worst feeling I've ever had with money, even though not a dollar of it was mine in the first place.
What I should have done was have our accountant estimate the taxes the week the wire landed, and prepay them that same week. The money would never have sat in our account long enough for my brain to start claiming it. When tax season came around, there would have been nothing to do. And whatever was left after that payment would have been our real number, the one every decision about the money started from.
The tax slice was never ours. It just landed in our account by an accident of routing. Send it home before you get attached.
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