Essays by Debora Ann Verburgt
Money is mostly paperwork that nobody explained.
I write about taxes, freelance income and the small administrative decisions that quietly set the terms of your year. One person, one opinion, no advice about your situation.
Latest
Long-form opinion, published when there's something worth arguing about rather than on a schedule.
Free tax filing is never quite free, and the word is doing pricing work
Every year the word 'free' does an enormous amount of work in tax software marketing. Here is what it actually describes, and why the irritation it produces is mostly a matter of sequencing.
Nobody sits you down and explains quarterly taxes
Going freelance changes a lot of things. The one that ambushes people is learning that tax is not an annual event, and that nobody is going to tell them.
Your refund is not a bonus. It's a receipt.
A large refund feels like winning something. I want to make the case that it's closer to getting change back from a shop, and why that reframe changed how I think about the whole year.
A shoebox and a spreadsheet: only one of them answers a question
Plenty of people run two parallel record-keeping systems without ever admitting it. Here's what happens when you audit which one is actually doing any work.
Chasing every deduction costs more than it returns
There's a genre of advice that treats deductions as a game you can win with sufficient diligence. Here is what that game actually costs the person playing it.
What I write about
Five recurring arguments, revisited whenever I learn something that changes my mind.
Filing season
What actually happens between January and April, and why it never feels like the brochure.
2 essaysFreelance money
Invoices, quarterly payments, and the particular anxiety of income that arrives in lumps.
1 essayPaperwork
Receipts, records, and the boring habits that quietly decide how bad April gets.
1 essayMoney mindset
The stories we tell ourselves about refunds, windfalls, and being 'good with money'.
3 essaysTools and software
Opinions on the products that stand between ordinary people and their own numbers.
1 essayHow this site works
Everything here is written by one named person and published under that name. There are no guest posts, no sponsored articles, and no ghostwriting. Where something turns out to be wrong, it gets corrected in the text with a dated note rather than quietly edited or deleted.
The essays are opinion. They are not tax, legal or financial advice, and nothing on this site is tailored to your circumstances.