The Weight of Money

I’ve been getting behind on some of the site maintenance tasks and many great topics have been slipping away due to lack of time. This list is just a reminder that I need to get on top of some mostly admin tasks and look at where I want TWM to be going.

1. Avoid blog carnival overload. While I enjoy compiling the Personal Carnival of blog carnivals, they are taking too long and causing me to neglect other content. Instead of posting a Personal carnival for each carnival, I’ll tally up the personal content once a week. Also, due to time constraints, I may start posting only percentages and one or two really strong personal articles.
2. Post about the Carnival of Ethics, Values and Personal Finance: Blogger isn’t cooperating at the moment, hopefully it’ll let me read the articles later today.
3. Get a Site Traffic Analyzer: I’ve been using Google Analytics for several months and find it to be almost useless and unintuitive. I want to try one of the traffic tools I’ve seen other writers mention - suggestions?
4. Add WordPress Plugins: I know there are lots of little plugins that would make wordpress work a little harder for me and I need to get those added. Anyone have some plugin they can’tdo without?
5. Develop New Site Design: I’m finally feeling the motivation to work on the design of TWM and just waiting of the inspiration to gather speed. I’m excited about the changes because it’s been so long since I’ve played with design elements.
6. Organize Book Give-Away: I have two books I want to give away need inspriration for how to do it.
7. Post to Carnivals: I need to get back to posting to carnivals. I probably won’t contribute to the Carnival of Personal Finance because it has become almost too long for me read through, no need to help make it longer.
8. Reconsider Advertising: I keep going back and forth on having advertising or not having it on TWM. I don’t mind it on sites where it is done well, but sometimes I feel like I’m seeing more ads than content on other pages. Also, I would like to generate some additionalad income from this site but that doesn’t sit quite right with me. Perhaps this will be a never ending internal debate.
9. Reorder BlogRoll: I want to subcategorize my blogroll and make sure that I’m linking to sites that I read and highlight personal finance.

Looks like a lot to acomplish. Luckily, I have the extra time to get things donel I just need to get started.

It is almost time to look at our taxes and, for the first time, I’m actually worried about what I’ll find. This is probably an irrational fear because I’ve never had taxes turn out negatively for me. However, I’m getting in W-2s and am pretty surprised at the deductions taken for taxes (small red flags). Also, I was very surprised to see that the partner had not adjust his withholdings when we wed last year and is still having taxes withheld at the single person rate (add that to the immediate to-do list).

So, I’m anxiously waiting to get in all the relevant tax forms from investments and all of that good stuff. I’ve never done taxes as complicated as this (multiple investment accounts, savings accounts, student loan interest) but figure that it’ll probably be easy enough. However, I want to get cracking because I want to know if we’re gonna have to come up with some more cash for last year’s taxes.

Also, since the partner takes his taxes to be prepared, I think we’ve agreed that I’ll work up the numbers and they we’ll go and see what the professional has to say. If we come out the same, then we’ll no longer use a preparation service. However, if I’ve clearly missed some major deductions we could have taken, then we’ll keep using a tax service (or, reality wise, I’ll beef up my income tax knowledge). The tax service option isn’t my idea, instead I’m trying to deal with some concerns (fears) the partner has about the ability for anyone to do their own taxes. Maybe, come next month, he’ll accept that my preparation is good enough and we’ll drop the comparison point (and save the cash).