Taxes

Well this Tuesday I am tackling my taxes. Yeah I know talk about last minute, right? I have actually been working on my taxes for the past week, and it really has been a big reminder that being organized really does pay off. I just keep thinking about all the time I would have saved this past week if I were disciplined enough to keep my tax receipts organized throughout last year.

So this year I plan to get organized in the tax department and I just wanted to share a few tips of mine on how I plan to do this:

Organizing Receipts – I don’t know about you but I am addicted to itemizing everything, and getting every deduction I am entitled to. One of the best tips I have received on getting those receipts organized is to buy one of those expanding file folders and reserve one pocket for each month of the year. Whenever you get a receipt for something that is tax deductible you just place it in the pocket for that month.

Organizing Online Receipts – Last year I started a receipts folder in my email, but honestly that wasn’t specific enough because this year I had to sort through the 2008 and 2009 business receipts. So I got more specific with my folder labels and started a 2009 business receipts and a 2008 business receipts folder. This year I also plan to print up all my online receipts at the end of the month so I don’t spend an entire day printing up receipts for my records.

Tracking Donations – Goodwill is like my favorite place in the whole world. Well not really, but I know our family goes up there to make donations quite a bit. When you are an organizing mom you usually end up with a pile of stuff you simply don’t need. I know with us we donate a lot of clothes, I have three kids, and well ya’ll know how that is! So we donate a lot of stuff to Goodwill and they always ask me if I want a receipt and for some reason I always say NO!

Well this year I plan to take them up on their offer and start counting my donations to Goodwill. I have also found this awesome little tool offered by Turbo Tax called It’s Deductible. With “It’s Deductible” online software you can easily track your donations year round for free. It accurately values your donated items that meeets IRS guidelines, and when it’s tax time you can just import everything to Turbo Tax.

So those are my plans for getting organized for next years taxes. I am always looking for more tips, please feel free to share in the comments below!

Prayer:

Dear Heavenly Father,
Lord I just want to say thank you for your constant provision in my life. Not only that but you are always so gracious even when I certainly don’t deserve it. Lord I just pray for your help to be more disciplined in every area of my life. Asking for the ability to be more disciplined scares me, because it truly is something I personally struggle with, but I know with Your help and guidance we will succeed. I love YOU, and Thank YOU for EVERYthing. My life would be nothing without YOU. I pray this all in your might Son Jesus’ name. – Amen!

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Heather is a Christian Stay at Home Mom of three and happily married to her loving Firefighter husband, Shaun. Her hobbies consist of blog design and blogging. Heather is the author of the “Christian Moms Guide to Organizing Your Home.” She also keeps herself busy homeschooling her three children and shopping at Target.

Organizing the Hallway Closet

Well hello! So this is my very first post here on Women by Grace – can I just say I love this website?! What a great place for all women to go and find encouragement to be all that God created them to be. I am so excited to be a regular contributor here and to be apart of the Women by Grace website.

First I would like to introduce myself, my name is Heather and I am a Christian Stay at Home Homeschooling Mom of three beautiful children, and I am also married to the love of my life, Shaun. I love blogging and doing web design in my spare time. As a mother of three I have learned that an organized house is an efficient house. Just ask my husband, I am all about being efficient.

Efficient: Acting or producing effectively with a minimum of waste, expense, or unnecessary effort.

As a wife, mom, teacher, and online business owner I need to be able to accomplish my household tasks in the least amount of time possible so I can have time for what really matters – spending time and developing meaningful relationships with those around me. Being organized helps me achieve this goal by keeping things in order and in it’s place.

One of my greatest pet peeves is searching for something that is not in the right place. I’m not a fan of clutter – although after you see the pictures I am going to share with you in the coming weeks you may begin to question this – even if I don’t like clutter it sure seems to have it’s way of creeping into my house.

I believe that my role as a Christian Stay at Home Mom is to keep my house in order and make it enjoyable to live in for my family. I truly believe an efficient home is a happy home.

So this week we are going to tackle the Hallway Closet – or the coat closet.

Now I will admit it’s taking a lot of courage for me to show you the before pictures. I just can’t believe how cluttered and messy the hallway closet was, and it had been like that for years. When we moved into our house about 6 years ago we just never got around to organizing the hallway closet, and it really just got worse from there. All of the sudden it turned into the catch all closet of miscellaneous things we never EVER use!

Here are the before and after pictures:

Before (ack!):

After (ahh!):

I don’t know, is it just me or do pictures make messy hallway closets look worse than they do in real life? After I took the before picture I was SHOCKED at how bad the closet actually looked. I honestly didn’t think it looked THAT bad.

So now my new thing before I start organizing a room I take a picture of the room so I can really see where the clutter is building up. Sometimes when we look at something on a daily basis it doesn’t look so bad, but when we take a picture of it we get a new perspective of the room.

Here are some tips to organizing your hallway closet in about 30 minutes or less!:

• Grab two bags – 1 for trash and one for Goodwill.
• Put all the coats, clothes, and any other items you don’t use or that don’t fit anymore into the Goodwill bag.
• Throw away all the empty boxes, and trash that you can’t donate to Goodwill and that you don’t use anymore. I can’t even tell you how many shoe boxes were just hanging around the top of my closet. If you plan to use the shoe boxes to store items around the house then implement them RIGHT AWAY, if you can’t – throw them away.
• My Little Green Bin – If you look at the after picture you will notice my cute little green bin. I bought this at Target for $7.99 and I now use it to store items like gloves, scarves, etc.. It really is a handy little bin and it is reasonably priced.
• Hangers – Take all the empty hangers out of the hallway closet and hang them up in the laundry room.

It’s amazing how little time, effort, and money it took to organize the hallway closet, not to mention I did find a few things I plan to sell on craigslist!

Organizing your house can truly be a blessing, sometimes we just need to stop procrastinating and just get it done. Committing to 30 minutes a week to organizing a specific room or corner of the house can truly pay off.

Prayer:
Dear Heavenly Father, Thank you for your provision in this world and giving me a home to take care of and live in. Lord help me to stop procrastinating and do the tasks required by me as a homemaker with love and joy. Help me to have the heart of a servant in everything I do. Help me to keep my priorities and heart straight, it can be tough at times to juggle them all in the correct order. Thank you for your love, guidance, and your grace. I pray this all in your might son Jesus’ name – Amen!

I hope you will check back with us next Tuesday for more tips on organizing your home.