With my babydoll being a trucker, he has a ton of paperwork.  Prior to me, he never kept track of anything.  Never kept anything.  Even important documents like contract agreements.  One day I asked him, “do you have the title to your truck?” He said, “no”.  “Do you have the agreement of lease purchase for your trailer?” He said “no”.  OMG DUDE!!!!!  I nearly flipped out!

Mind you, I’m the girl who will save a receipt from 10 years ago and still has 1999 tax returns. So this drove me insanely crazy.  I went to home depot and bought a file bin, folders, manilla folders, labels, and created an excel spreadsheet of his expenses.  Basically, I took the reigns.  My natural business mind looked at this like I do everything else in my life.  How will this disorganization and “half ass” tactics affect us in the future?  The future we are trying to create.

With the help of an accountant, I amended his last 5 years of tax returns.  Why?  Because the same woman who cut his paycheck from his last employer, the employer who pretty much stole his $40,000 trailer (this was due to lack of babydoll not keeping the original agreement documentation and this man knew it), the employer who took out the money he owed another co-worker that helped him in a crunch (hello! illegal), and didn’t pay him for 5 months also did all of the sub-contractors taxes.  Can we say conflict of interest!  Needless to say with all my griping I finally got my way and he left that company and went to a bigger, more reputable one.  I amended all, went through every receipt, document, log book for the past 5 years, and in this process I made his truck a legal company.  Now, his truck is separate from us as a couple.  I now have Quickbooks for Self Employed that will make quarterly taxes oh so easy, a folder we keep all diesel receipts in and things like food, shower expenses, equipment etc.  I got a scanner/copier/fax machine and set up a mini home office.  I bought him all the office supplies he needs for his truck from Dollar Tree and Office Depot, gave him a plastic organizer to file his receipts in, and an accordion filer to put his loads and log sheets in so I can enter them in Quickbooks every time he comes home to keep track of every little thing.

I’m also creating his website and will do business cards shortly.  Yes, I’m a computer geek when it comes to this sort of thing and I have six years in Government contracts and my father owned his own company forever.  I love this stuff LOL.  To get my home office, I took the little nook we had in our hallway.  Set up the laptop, added a cute lamp, some hanging organization on the wall, and an inspiration piece of artwork I got for $5 from At Home or Garden Ridge it used to be called.  I took a chair I had from my old dining room set we aren’t using since we moved and VOILA!

Aside from all this, I got him a rewards card under his business name for Office Depot.  It is his dream to eventually get another driver to run his truck, lease another truck under lease purchase and have two drivers so he can spend more time at home with me and our hopefully growing family.  So all this, is setting up our future.