Just did my taxes. £1000. How awesome is that? Last year it was £5000. Of course, I made twice as much money last year. But still, it's good to get it all done with. I owed so little that they didn't split it into two payments. Just pay the £1000 and you're done for the year. Great.

Pretty easy to do the taxes too. You just open a spreadsheet, label columns "rent", "travel", "water", "council tax", "electricity", and whatever other expenses you have. Then a column for "income". Then you just go through your bank statements for the appropriate months and add the amounts to the approriate columns.

Now it's just the calculations. You total each column using the "autosum" feature. Then you take the transport total because you're allowed 100% of transport costs to be deducted.

The household expenses are a bit dicier. If you use your home for your business, you're allowed to take a certain percentage of expenses based on how much you use the property for business purposes. So in years past, I figured 5%. But this year I thought, "Well, I did a lot of transcripts. It's probably 10%" So you just take 10% of your household expenses and add this to your transport total.

"Wait a minute. Can you really claim council tax back as a loss?"

I don't know. Maybe. These are small sums that we're talking about anyway. And there's probably shit that I can claim for that I'm not claiming for. Like clothes. And lunch. Although, when I asked about this years ago, the person from HMRC said "no".

Then you add up your income for the "profit" total.

All that's left is to put your two totals ("profit" and "loss") into the HMRC tax form. Click "next" and you get your total tax that you need to pay. Couldn't be easier.

I remember it being ridiculously difficult in the US. Although, looking at the 1040EZ tax form, it's only one page. So maybe I'm misremembering.