Paperwork Day

I could wait no longer to spend the day on taxes. I still have a couple of hours of work left but it'll be to our prep guy by Friday morning. We pull all the stuff together, organizing the W2's and 1099's and 98's and other forms and making up spreadsheets of charitable donations with the supporting letters, the real property tax amounts and such. Then we take the package to a friend who does what he can with our bad habits and produces something that will pass with the state and federal authorities. We could do the last step ourselves, but not as well or as easily. Once a year it is worth paying someone for the hassle.

Much of the mileage on the car is from pet sitting, but that's not an issue for taxes. In most services, the sitters get paid the federal rate of 50 cents per mile for travel to and from a pet sit job. What is left from the pay after covering the cost of the mileage is taxable income. That is why pet sitters usually have their primary clients within a limited distance of their house. If the job was far away, the amount the sitter gets paid wouldn't cover the cost of mileage. One solution is to charge a clients that live well out of the service's range an additional mileage fee, and the service for which I work has a couple of long-standing clients who do pay this fee. But most people look around for someone closer by when they hear this part.

That is also why I appealed to this pet sitting service. The person who was quitting lived just outside of the City, so I could cover the same geographic territory without running deficits on mileage costs. There is good money to be made pet sitting if you are an independent operator, but working for a service is not a way to get rich. That said, it also means that someone else has to handle the insurance, the bonding, the clients, the payroll.... something which I have no ambition to manage.


There is an impression that people make tons of money in pet sitting. I suppose in the rarefied air of northern New Jersey or similar metropolitan areas that may be so. But after a couple of years of pet sitting, I feel that if anything the pay tends to run a little low against the requirements of the job. There are no educational degrees that I know of for this job, except for perhaps veterinary technicians. But it takes a formidable amount of calm, creativity and comfort with animals to walk into someone else's house and deal with the difficult cat or a dog that is dangerously anxious because its owners left town.

So far I've only encountered one situation where I had to get the animal hauled to a kennel for my own safety, and I am told that was one of just three such instances in the history of this service. But that one time was enough to get my attention - I've been a little more cautious of new clients with difficult dogs since then. It's not the animals' fault. They can't help their own dependencies. But the owners can't always tell how those issues will play out when they leave the critter alone with a stranger coming in the door.