The January Surprise

Karen was having a lovely year.

Her yoga classes were full. People kept buying yoga blocks she’d sourced from a sustainable bamboo forest run entirely by enlightened pandas. Someone had even paid for a six-week course without asking for a discount, which in the wellness industry is roughly equivalent to spotting a unicorn driving a Volvo. Life was good.

Every month, money arrived in Karen’s bank account. And every month, Karen looked at the balance and thought, “Look at all this money”. Which, as it turns out, is not always a reliable conclusion. Because some of it wasn’t Karen’s money.

Some of it belonged to HMRC. HMRC, unlike Karen, does not practise non-attachment. HMRC remains extremely attached to its money. But Karen didn’t think much about that. Instead, she bought a singing bowl the size of a satellite dish, a retreat, three books about abundance, and a ceramic incense holder shaped like a meditating badger.

Then January arrived. And with it came The Letter. Not an actual letter. More a number. A very large number. A number so large it looked less like a tax bill and more like the population of a medium-sized town.

Karen stared at it. The tax bill stared back. The singing bowl offered no practical assistance whatsoever.

Then things got dark. The retreat money was gone. The abundance books were surprisingly vague on the subject of tax liabilities. The badger had virtually no resale value. And so, for a few painful months, Karen had to take a job in a call centre.

This was unfortunate because Karen had spent the previous five years encouraging people to breathe deeply and release what no longer served them. The people calling the broadband helpline had very different goals.

One gentleman called Keith spent seventeen minutes explaining why a flashing orange router light had ruined his Tuesday. Karen nodded, apologised, and quietly reflected that perhaps setting aside money for tax would have been preferable.

Now, here’s the boring-but-important bit: Every time money comes into your business, a chunk of it isn’t yours. It’s future tax. So treat it like future tax. Open a separate savings account. Every month, move a percentage across. Don’t think about it. Don’t negotiate with yourself. Don’t tell yourself you’ll do it next month. Just move it. Like putting leftovers in the fridge before you accidentally eat them while looking for cheese.

Then, when your tax bill arrives, you won’t experience that unique sensation of discovering you’ve accidentally spent HMRC’s money on a badger. You’ll simply transfer the funds and get on with your life. Which is considerably more zen and, according to Karen, more enjoyable than dealing with Keith.

Main – image created by Sarah Atwell