As the title says I haven't done my tax in a long time, been working full-time for the last 7 years and have 7 years worth of tax ready to be processed on the my gov app but have a few years previous to that where I was either working cash in hand or only intermittently working.
How screwed am I?
How much will this cost me at a tax agent?
How far back will I need to go to get everything up to date?
Cheers
I just learned that the night shift supervisor where I work has a second part time job he works during the day. Being a supervisor and night shift he's paid quite well and we live in a low cost area. But he owns two suped-up, flashy cars. His wife also works here and she drives a Prado. They admit to spending a fortune on their cars. Insurance and rego alone would be close to $10k a year I reckon.
Then there's the young guy who drive the brand new Ford Ranger. Kid eats cups of noodles most days and once, after he feinted at work, everyone learned that he barely eats and has been feeling rubbish for ages but didn't go to the doctor as he couldn't afford it. I told him he needs to sell that truck, "but how would I get to work?" he says. There's another young girl, just out of high school and working a min wage, entry level job at the factory and she drives a brand new BMW X1. It has the green P-Plate and a massive "juicy" sticker on it.
Then there's me. Almost 20 years ago I owned a supercharged HSV commodore. Spent a few grand on this massive stereo system for it too. I bought it when I still living with my mum. But once I moved out and was lumped with all those adult responsibilities it wasn't as fun. All I did in that thing was drive to work and back. The missus and I eventually bought a house together (this was in 2006 when houses were cheap and you could borrow 100% of the mortgage) so now we had a decent mortgage to pay on top of this car payment I had. A year later we had a baby and now it was all too much. The weekly expenses were more than my one income, so we not only sold my car, but her car as well (a neat and tidy Rav4 with low kms that sold for way more than mine did despite mine costing way more a few years prior). We took all that money from the two sales, paid off my car loan, which greatly improved weekly cashflow, then went and bought a 2003 Camry. We lived with one car for 6 years until our first child started school, then we really needed another car. So I bought a cheap little Ute for $3,500 cash. We drove these boring old bombs around for 10+ years until our house was paid off. This one "move" made life liveable for us. Those other cars were just too expensive and unnecessary.
I haven't even mentioned the people who show up on Caleb Hammers "Financial Audit" or on any of Zac Rios's videos (financial youtubers), everyone is just drowning in car debt its insane.
