July 8, 2025 · Episode 28
51 Min, 13 Sec 

Summary

Why is doing your taxes so emotionally exhausting—especially if you’re a creative? In this episode, Breallyn and Lyndon wade through the chaos of EOFY for artists, from mismatched thinking styles to getting sacked by accountants. It’s a painfully relatable look at why the financial world feels like another planet—and what it costs us just to exist on it.

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Transcript

Lyndon: Welcome to Pain In The Arts, where the pursuit of meaningful art meets the unpredictable demands of real life.

Brea: I am Breallyn.

Lyndon: And I am Lyndon, tax agent to the Stars.

The Fire Pit Saga

Brea: I noticed you have a fire pit in your studio.

Lyndon: Oh, I’m glad you saw that ’cause I thought we’d talk about that. You’ll be pleased to know that pre-purchasing of that did not involve too many hours of my time, but I did too many hours. I did watch a few nerdy and some quite funny videos on comparing fire pits.

Brea: Yeah, I’m pretty sure it took you at least a whole morning.

Lyndon: You know what I had to do? I had to find videos that objectively supported the idea of purchasing pretty much the cheapest one on the market.

Brea: And you were on a tight time limit because this particular one was on special.

Lyndon: Well, they do that, don’t they? Yeah, this particular brand, but it’s a folding one. I wanted a fire pit that would lay flat in the car and would take five seconds to set up. I didn’t want to be fiddling around with bits and pieces and clips.

Brea: This is…

Lyndon: Too many bits and pieces I wasn’t interested in. I just wanted to open it up, so it was a design I already knew that I would get, but there’s a few different brands and there’s a few different styles of that design. And to be honest, I would’ve preferred to buy the original one, but it’s about four or five times the price, so I couldn’t really justify it.

Brea: You’ve gone with a cheap Chinese knockoff.

Lyndon: Yeah, and if it warps and starts giving me too much stress, I know what I’ll be doing. But, having said all of that, I did get it home and it has a grill component. Of course when I opened that up and set it up, it didn’t sit flat and I thought, oh, that’s not good. That’s gonna, that’s really gonna bother me.

Brea: Any little noises, any…

Lyndon: Wobbles…

Brea: Discrepancies, anything that, yeah, you can’t handle that sort of thing? No.

Lyndon: If it’s because something’s sitting on a rock and it’s a little bit skewiff, that’s fine. That’s just how it is. But when it’s something being manufactured and designed and you’ve paid money for it, nah, it’s gotta, it’s gotta work properly.

So anyway, I could see what the problem was and I thought, gee, it’s got a real tenuous weld joint here. When they’ve welded it, they haven’t done a good job at all. So I thought I’d take to it with the mallet, just coerce it a little. It only needed to move a couple of mil. I thought, I don’t think it’s gonna work, but I’ll give it a crack. And that’s literally what I did. I cracked the weld. So now there’s no weld joint. There’s no weld joint at all.

Brea: And are you gonna get out your welding kit and do it yourself?

Lyndon: I can’t. And I don’t weld. But also it’s stainless steel, not very good quality stainless steel, but stainless steel. So you need…

Brea: And how did you discover this?

Lyndon: You need a special welding license to do stainless steel.

Brea: I happened to walk in on one of these lengthy videos that you are watching, while it was discussing the quality of the stainless steel and the different…

Lyndon: Oh, it’s a 201, I think instead of a 316. Yeah.

Brea: Oh my gosh.

Lyndon: Yeah. You don’t want, you don’t really want 201. Look, I’m not into buying stuff and then just throwing it out after a couple of years and buying another one. But economically speaking, you literally could buy four of these, which…

Brea: Is really sad.

Lyndon: Which isn’t my…

Brea: Much more into…

Lyndon: No, it’s not.

Brea: Get one and try to make it last a lifetime.

Lyndon: The original one would last you a lifetime. Yeah. See, this for me, falls under, I wouldn’t call it an experiment, but it’s just a bit of an idea. I’ve got to be able to go out in the car and just do some solo camping just to try and inject a little bit of adventure into my existence. And I was thinking, you know what I really like when I go camping? A fire.

Brea: Fire?

Lyndon: Yeah. And we do have a pretty good one that we take.

Brea: We’ve got a, we’ve got a traveling fire pit, we’ve got an at-home fire pit. So now this is your third fire pit. And, yeah.

Lyndon: A lot of these guys doing reviews owned multiple fire pits and their wives were just like wandering in and out of shot going, ‘Tell them why you’ve got seven fire pits.’ And then they’d just wait until the coast was clear and they’d keep going on explaining.

Brea: Why this is the seventh necessary purchase.

Lyndon: I don’t wanna, I really don’t… I’m not gonna be… Yeah, no.

Brea: Yeah, keep trying to justify your third fire pit.

Lyndon: No, this is an easy one because there’s no room for the other one in the car. And what I want to be able to do is in the back of it’s just the Tarago, but I wanna be able to have room in it. If I go away and yeah, I might do a gig that’s a few hours drive away, like it becomes an option because I can just go, I’ll just sleep in the car.

So it needs to have practical space for my gear as well, and I don’t wanna be moving a fire pit around inside the car to get to the PA or something like that. So if it’s just under the seat out of the way, it’s perfect. So we’ll see. A good idea, good design. I did have to buy a canvas bag to carry all the firewood in, though.

Happy EOFY For Artists

Lyndon: I thought what was worth a mention thinking about our week so far was our Sunday night conference call.

Brea: I’m glad you brought that up because I’m bringing the topic today and that had been quite strong in my mind as well.

Lyndon: Oh, really? Yeah. Have I preempted what you’re gonna talk about?

Brea: Yeah. You’ve done quite a nice segue actually into it. Oh, wow. Do you wanna know the title of today’s topic?

Lyndon: Yeah.

Brea: Topic is: Happy End of Financial Year.

Lyndon: Wow. What an oxymoron.

Brea: Indeed.

Lyndon: EOFY.

Brea: The day that we’re recording is actually the 2nd of July. Probably won’t be the day you are listening to it, but it is the day we are recording, which means that the financial year has just clicked over.

Lyndon: I remember having a rant, like when we were doing a conference call. Is it a conference when it’s just two people? It’s just us. It’s just a call. The conference call. It’s just a phone call. Anyway, I remember complaining that why don’t the banks let you get statements that correspond with the BAS quarters? So every time I’ve tried to get like a genuine bank statement, it’ll only go from one period to the next and it will change depending on the account that you have. And then it will change depending on which bank you are with as well.

So having this big moment and going, I don’t understand, like it doesn’t seem to bother the accountants of the world or the bookkeepers. It really bothers me. I can’t function. Like why don’t they just go, okay, yes, here’s your statement for this three-month period and it corresponds exactly to the BAS. That just makes perfect sense to me. But no. And anyway, we got on there, as in our bank website. Yeah. And just into our own accounts, put in the date range. And it just created for, in the past…

Brea: You didn’t used to be able to do that, but yeah, you can do that now.

Lyndon: You could put in a date range, but it would just spew out this nearly like an Excel spreadsheet, CSV looking document. But this time…

Brea: It’s just all too much.

Lyndon: It was a stumbling block. My goodness. I’ve just been looking at our numbers. I’ve got a bit obsessed and I’m trying to dial it back now. But now that we’ve, now that we’ve got half a year’s worth of podcasts up, there’s some statistics that are interesting to look at without getting too crazy. ‘Cause it’s all very humble beginnings. But I am learning to read all the backend information.

And you’ll be pleased to know that it’s growing. So in January, if you look at my finger, it’s an inch away from my thumb. This is literally the size on the screen. That’s where it was. And that represented, I don’t know, like 30 downloads. And then by June it’s that much. Wow. So you can see by my hand…

Brea: You’ve got your finger and thumbs spread out quite a long way. Maybe that was 30 listeners in January.

Lyndon: I can’t remember. I’m not good with numbers. Okay. The important information is that the graph goes up. Great. So it’s going up like a hill. So if you wanna support the show, a great way to support the show is on our Patreon, just go to patreon.com and type in the name of the show,

Pain In The Arts, and you’ll find us there. Also, you can go to our website, which is PainInTheArts.life, L-I-F-E. And that’s also a great way to support what we do. Okay. Let’s get on with the show.

The Infamous Conference Call

Brea: Now our conference call Sunday night, was it Sunday night? Monday night?

Lyndon: I’m happy to call it a conference call ’cause it sounds businessy. Yeah. Which I think we do to things so that A, it props us up a little bit in our own minds that we’re oh, we’re doing something businessy and important and legit, but also to, I don’t know, mate. That’s probably the only reason.

Brea: We did have to stop watching our show, quite sternly, pause it and tell ourselves to get on into our respective offices.

Lyndon: I remember it was like 9:30 and the night. Right. That episode’s finished. We’ve gotta get this stuff to the bookkeeper. She’s asked for it twice. It’s well overdue, and I said it should only really take us five to 10 minutes and then the reward will be the next episode of the show. Meanwhile, it was like an hour and something later. We sat down when we really should have been going to bed. But everybody knows you can’t go to bed after doing tax work doing a BAS.

Brea: Yeah, no, that’s right. You can’t just do that. Go to bed. We promised ourselves an extra episode. We had to fulfill it because we’re idiots. But yeah, our conference call, yeah, really was just, this is you and me calling each other going, what do we need again? What’s so what? Hang on. It’s the BAS. So that’s the quarterly ones.

Lyndon: I went through all emails and found what we sent last time and even then wasn’t sure that we’d done it right. And then when I told you what to send and then what you told me what you were sending, it wasn’t even the same. And you’re like, yeah, I don’t think we need to send them that bank account. And I’m like, oh, okay.

Brea: And what’s weird is we’ve been business owners for decades. You’d reckon we’d have our head around what do we need to do once a quarter to get the stuff? We can’t even do our own BAS. We gotta get it to someone else to do it.

Lyndon: No, years ago you were doing that stuff. I was, I think…

Brea: I was actually, yeah, there was there when we started one of our business design. But it’s a little bit like lodging them, but they were happy. But it was a bit…

Lyndon: Like you in the kitchen where you can do it, but like the proportion of stress that it gives you leading up to it. And while you’re doing it is it’s disproportionate to the actual outcome.

Brea: Yeah, it does. It’s a big, it’s a really weird, big mental and emotional cost, which we’ll get into.

Lyndon: But do you remember it’s also like in the early days of when we owned a coffee van, at the end of the day’s trading, we’d bring it back and count every cent. Yeah. And everything was accounted for. Yeah. And the bookkeeping was, everything was like bang on.

Brea: It was meticulous. Yeah. We started, we were like, this is it. This is our fresh start in life.

Lyndon: There was also a lot of pressure. I remember coming back on those early days after working from sixish in the morning to midday and getting back around one o’clock and falling asleep. Yeah. Which doesn’t sound like me to fall asleep, but I think I, it wasn’t really the physical work, it was more the mental and emotional strain and when you’ve just outlayed that amount of money and then you need to find your customers and you need to pay the bank back, just, it takes a toll on your body as well. We were like, had to…

Brea: We were doing everything to make it work.

Lyndon: We had to be more on it, and we were, yeah. But it was, it was harder, I think, because it was really like against the natural grain of who we are. Like what did you say the other night? Or maybe it was when, once we came down after that five to 10 minutes work took an hour and it literally was only five minutes of work somehow took us an hour and, I was like, we’ll never change. Like we’re not, let’s not kid ourselves. I said, I knew this years ago and every now and then I try and I go, no, it’s just I can’t change who I am.

And you just need to accept that. And the whole thing is so trivial ’cause okay, we need to specify what we actually did. This is what I did. I think you did something similar. We went on to our bank website. We located our accounts.

Brea: Woohoo!

Lyndon: We put in a date range, downloaded a PDF statement for each account. So there was two documents or three documents each. I went to a Google folder for business receipts and poured through it to find ones for the date range that we needed. And I found four, which I was so excited by.

Brea: That you’d actually…

Lyndon: Yeah, photos of the receipts.

Brea: Put in there during this financial period.

Lyndon: The other realization was there weren’t many receipts. Which sometimes is an indicator that there weren’t many sales.

Brea: I always forget all the receipts.

Lyndon: Yeah. We’ve, this is a thing, it’s like…

Brea: Annoying.

Lyndon: It’s having drawers in your house and everything’s organized, but then you forget what’s in the drawer. Yeah. And it’s the same with all the folders on…

Brea: Yeah. It’s really annoying.

Lyndon: So anyway, so that’s, literally what we had to do.

Brea: That’s all we had to do.

Lyndon: I think all I sent, oh, I sent the bookkeeper was three PDFs and four photos of receipts. And it wasn’t just the fact that that should have taken maybe 10 minutes and it took an hour and we were on a call pretty much to each other the whole time we were talking about it. But it was the fact that the stress in the back of my mind that it had to be done and that was just lingering festering away at the back of my brain and somewhere between my shoulders for probably weeks. And I think it was probably similar for you. Yeah. And that’s why took, so I feel like…

Brea: That’s a feeling that never goes away. Because even when it’s okay, great, we’ve done that BAS. In fact, I think, are we up to date with them or is that like the last one?

Lyndon: We’re up to date except because we were doing it literally a couple of days ago. You’d think, oh, we’re up to date for this three-month period. But we were doing it for the first period of the year, which is January to March. Oh gosh. But the other thing, during the, like on the…

Brea: So we’re not…

Lyndon: On the conference call. Both of us are there going, shouldn’t the bookkeeper be, shouldn’t they be doing this? What are we doing this for? And we genuinely couldn’t understand why we were doing it.

Brea: I feel like we’ve given access to those. I thought, why aren’t we paying for this?

Lyndon: That’s why we don’t want any of it. We don’t even want to know about it. I don’t even want one of those accounts open anymore. It should have been closed months ago.

Brea: Yeah. So we’ve now got a, okay, so we’re not up to date. We now need to do another one.

Lyndon: I need a break from this recording. I’ve gotta go take an aspirin.

Brea: As I opened with it is the end of financial year, which means that it’s not just the quarterly BAS we’ve gotta do, we’ve gotta do all of the tax returns, which is not just our personal ones, but I did wanna talk about it because I don’t, I know you’ve said this is just who we are. We are never gonna change. But why is it so hard? It’s not even that hard, like you said, it’s just, it’s not even that difficult, but just seems so hard all the time.

Cognitive Style Mismatch

Lyndon: It’s fitting a square peg into a round hole. I might not be able to explain it very well. Each of us have been given different gifts and part of being given your gifts comes with the responsibility of understanding what gifts you haven’t been given. And some of these things are just put on us because we have to do it. So sometimes we have to do things that aren’t in our gifting or in our talents or in our strengths or in our, what comes naturally.

And you could say that just about and with anything you could go, it’s, it’s not that hard to catch a ball. Or for some people it’s terribly difficult to catch a ball and they must be so frustrated, but I can catch a ball, I can kick a football but I can’t get my BAS in on time. That’s why we have a bookkeeper. I still don’t get it.

Brea: I know. I was thinking back along the many years of our financial planning, not even planning, basic tax returning, and I was thinking now how many accountants is it that…

Lyndon: To change the light globe?

Brea: To change our globe too many. No, how many have sacked you as a client?

Lyndon: Oh, I forgot about that.

Brea: So this is something that people may not even know that you can get sacked from your accountant.

Lyndon: Didn’t we do a list of, of different jobs that we had done, and there’s quite a few different jobs that we’ve done over the years. And some of them were because we did all kinds of things while we were traveling for a year. But, we could also do a list of how many times I’ve been sacked. Yeah. In a way does it prove that I shouldn’t be working for other people?

Or does it, show that I should just be operating within my strengths and talents, or does it actually show that I did some things that were outside of that and because I ventured out I deserved to be sacked. I dunno, that’s what was saying. Dunno, yeah, there’s, probably only three. I Okay. I, look, I’m not gonna talk about them all, but yeah. I did get sacked by an accountant, which I didn’t even think was possible.

Brea: I just remember the bewilderment in your face going, ‘They sacked me. They, yes. They won’t see me ever again.’

Lyndon: Yeah. Formally sacked me. Yeah. Which is so bizarre.

Brea: But then we’re paying them.

Lyndon: I can’t remember who they were, but I do remember, and if anyone uses them, which is probably gonna be a bit of a stretch for anyone listening to our podcast, that they would use these accountants. But I do remember they, each of the employees had photos up where they’d pose with a Bengal tiger or a white tiger or something. And so that’s the image I have in my head where I go, I really care that an accountant sacked me? That…

Brea: Weird team building exercise day or something.

Lyndon: I don’t know. Good on them. I think they’ll probably right to sack me. And you know why it was.

Brea: Yeah, do tell.

Lyndon: Do you know why?

Brea: I can’t remember.

Lyndon: They asked for something from me, it would’ve just been the usual stuff.

Brea: Those pesky receipts or something.

Lyndon: Yeah. They said, we need this and this from you. And I said, yeah, no worries. I’ll get it to you next week or I’ll get it to you by the end of the week. And I didn’t, and I know that it wasn’t ’cause I just left it. I literally was doing what we did the other night going, it’ll take 10 minutes and took an hour. So I was just trying to get it all together and. And then, I think the next week I got a letter or an email. It was one or the other basically saying, yeah, you didn’t keep your promise, so we can’t, we can no longer have you as a client.

And I’d gone outta my way to find them as accountants. Do you remember we had to like travel from, I don’t know where were we, Seaford or somewhere down Bayside. Anyway, and we had to travel to Doncaster or Blackburn, I think. Yes,

Brea: I do remember this.

Lyndon: Yeah. Anyway, so they said I hadn’t kept a promise and I was just trying to work out what they’re talking about. I said, I hadn’t promised anything. They’re like, when we say we are gonna do something, we view it as a promise and that’s our expectation.

Brea: Wow. They got real deep.

Lyndon: Of our clients. And I was like, okay, see ya.

The Accountant Experience

Brea: See, I remember, I don’t know if it was that accountant, but I remember us going to one one time and I don’t even know why I was going because…

Lyndon: To hold my hand.

Brea: Yeah. I think I was your emotional support animal at the time. I think I just went, yeah. Along the, for the drive. ‘Cause I do remember we had at least one of the kids was a baby, so I wasn’t gonna go into the appointment. I was just gonna do a walk or whatever. And you headed on into the office. Now we got there. We obviously had not left on time. We’d taken a while to find a park.

And you went in there, you headed off into the appointment and then five minutes later walked out going, ‘They won’t see me. ‘Cause I’m late, I’ve missed the appointment. We’ve come all this way. And why can’t they be flexible on this?’

Lyndon: It probably was them. I don’t remember that at all.

Brea: Yeah, I remember that. And then…

Lyndon: I remember that feeling. Yeah. But I don’t remember where that incident, where it happened on that particular occasion. Yeah.

Brea: They wouldn’t even let you talk to…

Lyndon: It would’ve been them.

Brea: Your accountant. It was just like the, yeah. The reception was like, no, you are late. You’re not gonna be seeing your accountant.

Lyndon: Yeah. It’s such an affront to, it’s a humanity. Yeah. I don’t know. I just think I, I don’t know. I don’t know what I think.

Brea: It is a bit shit because these are people that charge us for their time, which, fair enough in 15 minute increments. So if you talk to them on the phone, you get a bill. And then they wanna download music and read books for free.

Lyndon: I see. You’re drawing that big comparison. I’m, that’s…

Brea: That’s gonna be a topic for another day is the disparity thinking in pricing and in value for, like monetary value for your labors, but… I just think it’s outrageous.

Lyndon: I know it sounds like it, but I just thinking back that sort of a situation on Yeah. Where we might, I might turn up and they go, yeah, sorry, you’re five minutes late so we can’t let you in. And that literally has happened before. It’s was that occasion you’re talking about.

Brea: There’s more than one.

Lyndon: Oh, I think it happens every now and then, but I think where it really bothers me, like sometimes I get it. And I understand the respect time and I understand that there’s people that move in circles where they just have to be like that. And that’s fine. What I don’t like is when the initial conversations and everything is about, oh yes, we’re definitely the right people for you. We can help you out. And you feel like, oh, this person or this company, or whatever are genuinely concerned about the little guy.

And I know like with bookkeepers and accountants in particular, in the past, we have sought out ones that are meant to have been like specialists for music business and so on. So they’re meant to be on your side.

Brea: Understand the particular struggles that. Yeah. Yeah, because…

Lyndon: There was another guy before that one that we went to down Bayside somewhere that was recommended to me as he’s got a lot of musicians on his books. I met up with him and it was the same kind of vibe, I just felt like he didn’t view me seriously at all, yeah. And didn’t get me at all.

Brea: Yeah.

Lyndon: And I was like, oh man, this hasn’t worked out. But yeah. So when that happens, I find that really bewildering because you get, it’s just, it’s not that bewildering. It’s just a sales pitch. And it’s happened, happens with banks like when you want a loan or something and they’re like, yeah, we can help you out with that. And this has happened a number of times before I realized, that’s how they operate. Where they go, oh yeah, we can do that for you. We’d be happy to help, just get us this and this.

I remember with, one particular bank, and it wasn’t even a lot of money I was asking for. It was a relatively amount. But, something that would’ve helped us out a lot at the time for whatever it was. And, I spent two weeks getting all the material that they wanted. I sent that in and I had a number of conversations with this woman as well along the way. And and it was all looking good.

And then I sent it in and they’re like, no. And I’m like, what do you mean though? I literally got you everything you asked for. And they’re like, no, we would never fund something like this. And I’m like, why say so in the first place? And I got back in contact with her and I said, how come this happened? What’s going on? And she goes, oh yeah. I don’t actually do all the applications or whatever. Yeah. I don’t assess the applications. That’s someone else’s job. And that’s someone else just straight up said no straight away. Yeah. And you know what they said? No, without having read any of the stuff I sent in.

Brea: Yeah.

Lyndon: It was just a flat out No. And I thought, is that just a ploy so that I’m not going to somewhere else? Like I don’t know. No.

Brea: Yeah. Why are they wasting our time?

Lyndon: Why did they waste literally two weeks of my time? Yeah. Anyway, so that, I don’t, yeah, from banks maybe, but it’s just a sales thing. Like it’s, isn’t it’s like you wanna hold all the cards in your hand and then decide whether you are actually gonna help this person out. So I guess to some degree everybody does that. You got weed out people, but, yeah, in the early days when I was younger, I found it quite, demoralizing, to be honest.

Brea: It’s demoralizing. It’s disheartening. And I think still to this day when I’m trying to do financey stuff, I’m trying to get things together.

Lyndon: Look, that up, that’s in the, that’s in the accountant’s dictionary.

Brea: Financey style.

Lyndon: It’s doing your bank reconciliation, but like in an evening wear.

Brea: Yeah, I have my robe on. And also a glass of wine. That’s how these things have gotta go down. As soon as I start looking at it, I feel so outta my depth and inadequate. And it’s not just going, oh, this is a bit unfamiliar and what do I have to do again? Is it trauma? I don’t know. But I start going like questioning all my life choices, feeling like I’m not a proper adult. Just feeling like how have I gotten this far in life? Clearly I’m not gonna make it.

Lyndon: I want a shout out Christine, one of our accountants.

Brea: Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah. She was great because she genuinely was like, you feel like that because it’s not your strength. That’s why I’m here. And she handled a lot of things.

Brea: She was very reassuring.

Lyndon: She was very reassuring. And if only she hadn’t sold the business. Yep. But…

Brea: And yeah, we ended up in the hands of somebody else who we’d never spoke the same language. No. It just was so difficult.

Lyndon: I think we could pretty much say anything we want on this episode about accountants, partly just to make us feel better. But also none of them would ever listen to me. No. But…

Brea: Yeah. No, the next guy, yeah. Never made us feel good at all. Not a word of reassurance.

Lyndon: Nah.

The Pain In The Arts of Tax

Brea: I have done a little bit of digging.

Lyndon: This, I gotta say, this episode I feel a little bit ill more so even than the worst gig moment. And I put gig in very loose, shady, inverted commas. They’re inverted commas that are just like slowly dripping down the page. They, the inverted commas are hiding behind a rock. But yes, this episode’s making me feel uncomfortable. Ill, and thank goodness we’ve got Brett Wood coming in next week. So that’ll…

Brea: It’ll lighten the mood.

Lyndon: Yep. That’ll…

Brea: Be great.

Lyndon: That’d be great.

Brea: Yes. We’ll…

Lyndon: I’ll talk about that a bit later. That’s just where I’m gonna put my thoughts right now. You do that, you, talk about all this ugly stuff and I’ll just think about, guitars and Gretches and oh, and Fender Strats and…

Brea: I see that I won’t be saying anything next week. I’ll just be sitting there like a shag on a rock. Look.

Lyndon: Hopefully I won’t be saying anything. I’d just love to hear what Brett’s got to. He’s got stories.

Brea: This is a podcast called Pain In The Arts. So we’re doing a bit of the pain today and, I was doing a bit of digging into the science behind why it sucks to do your tax returns. And there is reasons, there is actually reasons why for creatives, it’s obviously not just you and me. There is reasons why, like scientific reasons why it is harder and like why all those feelings of oh man, this is so hard and I can’t do, why can’t, I remember it’s such an effort. And not, and it’s not just that it’s an effort, it’s that it’s, it does have that effect of sucking your emotional tide out to sea.

So there is a cognitive style mismatch between creative people and those who thrive in industries like accountancy. Because creative people are a lot stronger in divergent thinking of having a lot of ideas, exploring the possibilities, making unusual connections between ideas and that sort of thing. Whereas things like your tax preparation it needs convergent thinking.

So focusing on the one correct answer, there’s only one right answer, very rigid rules, and detail that doesn’t allow for any shades of difference in it. So it’s literally, we’re literally trying to think in a way that we’ve been training our brains not to think in, because that’s what’s better for our art and for our creative things.

Lyndon: Okay, so here’s my problem with it. I know you probably haven’t finished.

Brea: No, that’s fine.

Lyndon: My problem with this is I know that about myself, so I’ve already accepted who I am. And I’ve had to do that. Probably annually, at least around this time, it’s, everybody else won’t accept it.

Brea: Yeah.

Lyndon: That’s genuinely the problem. And also what I’ve discovered is there’s a massive language difference.

Brea: Yeah.

Lyndon: And this is a big one for me because when I’m trying to find, I know that there’s an answer and it’s definitive, like you’re saying. That’s, that is an issue. But I’m genuinely trying to understand it. And I’ll give you an example. I’ve had to seek help from QuickBooks professionals before. So QuickBooks, the accounting or bookkeeping software.

Brea: Yeah.

Lyndon: Which I’ve been using for forever. And, there was an issue where something wasn’t reconciling. I couldn’t work out why it seemed like it should be something really simple. Get on the website and read like all the language. It’s, I don’t understand it. I spoke to a couple of help people who were actually really helpful, but there was still the language barrier that we had to get around. And then after hours and hours, it still wasn’t solved. Now I have a language skill.

Brea: Yeah.

Lyndon: Let’s say so around music.

Brea: Yeah.

Lyndon: Which, if I’m talking to another musician people that aren’t au fait with that language, they won’t understand it. Like they just don’t know. What I’m talking about. And it could, like just actually talking about musical ideas, concepts. There’s a language that we use now. There’s no reason for me to force that onto anybody else.

Brea: Yeah. True.

Lyndon: Do you know what I mean? There’s no time in the year where it’s of importance that someone else understands it and if they don’t, bad luck.

Brea: Yeah.

Lyndon: Do you get what I mean? Yeah. And so for me it’s music for other artistic people. They have their own language. And I imagine, it’s, just one of these things that we have to cross over into the real world or whatever, and it’s the world of economics and timelines and timeframes and tax and things that actually end up affecting you in real ways. In, in your ability to, own a car or to pay rent or anything like that. And we have to enter into this world and then understand whole other language that is second nature to a lot of people. So yeah. I find…

Brea: The other thing is…

Lyndon: That’s where, that’s why I’m saying like I’ve accepted that about myself and I’ve had to keep accepting that because there are the times where you go, what’s wrong with me? It, I know it, it should be really simple before it should be simple to just get online, get what I need and send it off. And it not be anything more than that.

Brea: The thing about the language that you’re saying there as well is all artists are about communicating. We’re all communicating something. We’re all about making a connection, showing people something in a, in our language, but in a way that they can connect to. And so we are literally all the time thinking about how can I show you something? In a new way that you can understand, whereas the accountants of the world don’t seem to give it a rats, that we don’t speak the language.

Lyndon: They don’t give a Bengal Tiger.

Brea: They’re not trying to help us understand. They’re not trying to see where we are at and reframe what they’re saying in a way that we understand. They literally don’t do that. They don’t try, they don’t care. They’re not trying. Whereas we are always trying to make those connections with language. So I say they’re not doing a good enough job.

The Struggle to Keep Up

Lyndon: John knows something funny. I was in the garage, like going through a whole bunch of old books and things. Something I found was my year 11 IE and it was my maths workbook and I said, oh, check this out. I did do maths in year 11. Pretty much my entire adult life, I’ve been telling everyone I did maths up until year 10, and then I didn’t do it for year 11 and 12.

Brea: Oh, there you go.

Lyndon: And then I just found evidence that yeah, I did do it in year 11 and I did it quite good. I actually was quite good at it. There you go.

Brea: And that, it’s just been wiped from your memory ever since?

Lyndon: Yeah. So I don’t, I’ve just brought that up because I dunno what that says about me and my relationship with numbers. Probably nothing, but, yeah.

Brea: This is funny because over the years, obviously we’ve been trying to do this stuff for years. I’ve kidded myself into thinking that I might be…

Lyndon: Better than you are.

Brea: Better than I am. Yeah. At all this, start.

Lyndon: At that.

Brea: Yeah. Yep. And it’s because one thing I have been able to do is work out filing systems. So I, do remember the year that I took over all of our bookkeeping sort of stuff, bill paying and account management and whatnot from you and. I said, I’ve got some time. I think it was after one or two of the kids had been born. I was like, I’ve got some time that, in the days I’m gonna sort this out. And you just bought me armfuls of loose papers back in the day when it was all, actual, you don’t wanna look in that box on the shelf behind you.

Lyndon: No, I knew when I put all that stuff in there, I had a client coming over and I knew when I put all that stuff in there, I thought, oh, this will be dangerous. I might forget it’s in there. Oh, dear. Oh.

Brea: So you’ve fooled me again. I came in and thought, oh, you’ve…

Lyndon: Tidied it up your studio here. I have tidied it up, but yeah, but I think that could be one of the reasons I haven’t slept great this week, because I think in the middle of the night in my dreams, I go, oh, there’s all that paperwork of stuff in that black box.

Brea: No. So you’re supposed to give that all to me now anyway. Most of it.

Lyndon: Oh, no. You say that, but your plate’s pretty full.

Brea: It is. I have managed to, yeah, this is the thing. I’m like, okay, I’ve got stuff sorted out into, quarters and files and different, different folders for the different businesses and personal things and Okay, great. I’ve got it sorted. I’ve spent all this time knuckled down. I’ve done my job Right and then. That sort of makes me think, okay, good on me. I’ve learned these skills and clearly I’m better than Lyndon at this.

Lyndon: I didn’t realize we were in competition. All I know is that over the years you’ll be like, so earnest and you’ll go, I can do this. We should be able to do that. And you’ll get oh, rah, let’s get it and we can do this and we’re better than this.

Brea: Yeah.

Lyndon: And, I’m there saying, I know who we are, I know who I am and I don’t wanna discourage you, but if it’s gotta take that much effort just to get up and going, then maybe I’m not saying you can’t and you’re not capable, but it’s just that how much effort it takes.

Brea: Yeah, it does take so much effort.

Lyndon: What actually is required. And…

Brea: But that’s what it’s been like. My thing of going, oh, like I am. Sure that whatever I put my mind to, I’ll do, I’ll be able to do it.

Lyndon: Yeah. I’ve had that same thing.

Brea: And I’m gonna do it and yeah. What? But then then I actually, once I’ve got all that stuff sorted and organized, and then I’ll occasionally, go, okay, I’ve got it sorted and here’s the bit that I need to send this week to the accountant. And then it’s out of sight and outta mind. And I can’t I know that I’ve got all that stuff somewhere. I can’t remember where. Yeah. I can’t remember why I filed it. What’s the importance of it? What does it mean? And, this is…

Lyndon: Why parents shouldn’t say to their kids, “Gee, you’re so smart. You could, you can do anything. You could be whatever you wanna be.” That’s why they shouldn’t say it, because then we grow up going, I can do this, I can do that. There, there’s nothing wrong with saying, I’m obviously being facetious, but there is nothing wrong with saying to someone. “You know what? That’s not your strengths. This is where your strengths are. Focus on your strengths.” As a starting point, but, the only quarters I like are football quarters, 20 minutes and time on. That’s it. Definitely.

The Cost of Being Caught Up

Brea: Given that it is such a strain on our executive functioning to be able to put our heads into accountancy world at least once a quarter, and then this time of year for the big guns of tax,

Lyndon: The big…

Brea: Which actually now I have to say, let’s give it ourselves a little pat on the back because this year we’re actually up to this year’s tax return, whereas.

Lyndon: Previous times we’ve been like, oh, we’re three years in, in arrears and we’ve really gotta do something about it now because we are gonna get in trouble with someone. So we’ve managed to catch up and make a bit of ground.

Lyndon: Mind you like, okay, I don’t want to put a fire blanket over this fire. You’re right. We’ve caught up now just financially to get our tax done costs us three and a half grand. So we just have done that in this past month. We’ve caught up. So if we were to now just get all our stuff to the accountant and the bookkeeper and whatever now to actually lodge at a reasonable time, the earliest perhaps ever in our life. We, we need to come up with another three and a half grand.

So I think there is a little bit of we can come up with three and a half grand over the course of the next, eight, nine months or something. Otherwise it means we’re shelling out seven grand inside two months. And for us…

Brea: Just for people to tell us how much money we don’t have, this is awful.

Lyndon: But yeah, we’re not getting any money back.

Brea: Yeah, no.

Lyndon: That’s just to keep everything in order. It’s just to keep…

Brea: All these other accountancy types happy that we’ve written down numbers somehow.

Lyndon: Yeah. And we, in life, we still have an ongoing obviously commitments to, to paying our GST, but also we have an ongoing nominal tax bill as well. So it’s not, it’s not like we’re paying three and a half grand for accounting services and we’re getting money back and we don’t owe anything to the government.

Brea: I think also it’s so depressing.

Lyndon: In our sort of feeble art artistic minds. We also think that we have to get everything back to zero and it’s gotta be a clean slate. And it’s that’s not even how businesses run anyway. No. It’s all about liquidity and money management and there’s good debt and bad debt and I’m now starting to talk way outta my depth! I just want another coffee. I just want this to be over.

Brea: I know this is a real, this is literally the Pain In The Arts that we experience.

Lyndon: I know. I put my head in the sand with stuff.

Brea: Oh yeah.

Lyndon: And that’s what’s great about playing guitar. You can put your head in the sand and you can feel really crap about yourself and know that there’s these unfair expectations put on me all the time. And then I just take a deep breath. I pull my head out of the sand, I shake all the dirt off of my feathers and I go, I’m a new man. I’m getting on with it. And then I sit down with my guitar and play until I drool. Yeah.

Brea: On that note, I’d like to propose that there is some sort of shift in the world in which the accountancy types, once a year have to put on a performance of types. They have to recite some good poetry that they’ve actually done, or they need to play an instrument or display something and we get to critique it. And if it’s not good enough, they can pay us back for all the, work done.

Lyndon: Okay. Think very carefully about this because you have seen when it used to be more common, thank goodness we don’t see it that much anymore, but the annual, like getting all the footy players up at some sort of gala and have a crack at singing and playing and yeah. It’s, you know what? Stick, just stick to football.

Brea: Stick to your own thing.

Lyndon: Although…

Brea: But this is the thing. We have to, we have to enter the accountancy world, bring all our feeble offerings to them, for them to judge it and get paid for judging it and sorting it out. But this is where the flip side should be. We get paid for critiquing their artistic efforts.

Lyndon: They should at least follow up with us and go look. ‘How are you feeling about everything that happened in the past couple of months? Normally, our regular clients, our good clients, the ones that we like to invest more time into. Normally they get it all done within two or three weeks. It took you a few months. How are you feeling? Like that must have been quite a, a big effort for you.’ And we go, yeah, it was, okay. ‘We’re just following up and and how’s your bank account looking? It’s still depleted?’ Okay. Yeah.

Brea: We took most of it, so we understand why that would be.

Lyndon: There’s no, there’s no…

Brea: Aftercare. There is no support.

Lyndon: What’s it called? It’s called like pastoral care or something. Or even just, yeah. And I think, Christine did try a little bit of that.

Brea: She was, yeah, she was a lot better. She bought us tickets to go see U2 with her. She took us U2.

Lyndon: Was, that was great. That was nice. She was generous, like great. And…

Brea: Maybe it’s because she was so nurturing that’s why we were so good then at the stuff we knew we could ask her stuff. We knew what we were doing. I was doing all those BAS’s and, pretty much reconciling all our accounts and everything weekly and making sure everything was…

Lyndon: Oh yeah.

Brea: Was going really well. Yeah.

Lyndon: We had a golden age.

Brea: Yep.

Lyndon: It doesn’t take much to beat it out of us.

Brea: Mind you, we did have a baby then, and then she started to get ill. So that was we do forget about that. And…

Lyndon: That is, yeah, that is another thing I have to remind myself of is that we’re not a regular family. We’re not even just…

Brea: Regular artistic people. We are. It’s, the thing that dominates every day and every part of our lives. So it’s, yeah. It can’t be underestimated how much it bleeds into literally everything that we do.

Lyndon: Well. It doesn’t just bleed into everything. It, it interrupts, gets in the way and, completely blankets things.

Brea: Sometimes derails everything. Yeah.

Lyndon: I think too, like just that period of life where you’ve got young kids, it, is challenging. ‘Cause it’s new. You’re learning to be the parents. That you want to be, things are coming into being, that you only had dreamt about or thought about of, when I’ve got kids, this is what I’ll do and this is what it will look like. And so that’s all happening. So that’s all new. And then if you start a new business, like that’s all new and it’s all in the same kind of energy pot if you like.

Brea: Yeah.

Lyndon: And that doesn’t last because your kids don’t stay that age. Different things happen. And life changes but tax doesn’t. We were talking about that whole sort of journey of also trying to find financial advisors. That’s a shit show as well.

Brea: Absolutely.

Lyndon: Oh my gosh. I don’t even know. I wanna, I don’t even know whether, we’ll even do a, an episode on that because…

Brea: Oh, we should. We’ve got some fun stories about that too.

Lyndon: Have we? Oh, maybe we will. But earlier you’re talking about let’s just say accountant types that are so demanding of us in their narrow set of rules and vision of the world. And, I…

Brea: I don’t think I said it like that.

Lyndon: I dunno. Don’t know. You said something.

Brea: That’s all right. We’ve already established accountants aren’t listening.

Lyndon: And then you’ve gone. You, you, you sounded pretty jaded. You’ve lightened up in the last hour. Oh, good. And you’re like, but then they’ll enjoy movies and read books and consume arts. And it reminded me of…

Brea: But wanting to do it for free and wanting…

Lyndon: To do it for free. That’s right. And I’d actually just reposted this on my Instagram today. Which is a quote from, I dunno who, it says,

Brea: You gotta credit properly.

Lyndon: Joel Vili may have said this? They’ll tell you that the arts and humanities aren’t practical. And then read poetry at funerals and weddings, cry over films and search for meaning in ancient philosophy. Surviving is one type of practicality. Knowing why we bother is another.

Brea: Yeah.

Lyndon: And so that was on the importance of the arts and humanities.

Brea: Yeah. We, know and we don’t understand why everyone doesn’t know how important art is for all of us all of the time.

Lyndon: I wanna know why my careers teacher didn’t suggest that I study humanities. That was never suggested to me as an option.

Brea: Even maybe you just went, ah, I don’t like geography and history.

Lyndon: I was very focused on the future when I was at school. That’s true. But geography, I was, an A plus student.

Brea: There you go.

Lyndon: Yep. Mind you ask me where, name a country and ask me where it is…

Looking Forward: Brett Wood Next Week

Brea: Therein wraps up the end of financial year episode.

Lyndon: Thank goodness that we’ve got Brett Wood coming on next week. I mentioned earlier that he was now he’s known for his guitar skills with Pete Murray and Melbourne’s own heavy rock institution Electric Mary.

Brea: Yes.

Lyndon: He just released his first single a few weeks ago and he’s got another one coming out in a couple of weeks. And he has very kindly agreed to come on the show, be our second guest. Yeah, I’m really looking forward to catching up with him. I haven’t seen him for years and it’s interesting. It’s been one of those Instagram relationships.

Brea: Oh.

Lyndon: Yeah, which we all know and love and it’s always a strange thing to meet someone IRL. Short for ‘in real life’ for all you oldies and, you feel like you know this person, then you go, hang on. Actually, we’ve never met.

Brea: Yeah.

Lyndon: I have met Brett before, but…

Brea: That is odd. Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah. And you don’t know who knows. What about you and. Yeah. Anyway so tune in next week, for our conversation with the incredible guitarist and singer, Brett Wood.

Brea: Yeah.

Lyndon: You’ve been listening to Pain In The Arts. Thanks for listening today. If you need any more financial advice, taxation help, please email us and we’ll see you next week.

Brea: Bye.

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