A Paint Job

My wife's apartment has a south facing wall with large windows that let in a lot of light and that allows us to see all our plants out on our balcony from inside. It's a great arrangement, except that it makes the apartment difficult to keep warm in the middle of winter. But winters are short in Portugal, so it's a problem we can live with.

Another problem is that the wood frames need to be painted every so many ears. This, we've been neglecting for too long. More than ten years have gone by without us doing anything, and the other day I discovered a whole nest of little insects living under a bit of cracked paint. When I pealed the paint away, the little black creatures, no bigger than fruit flies, came crawling out. I was for a moment afraid that these were termites of some kind, but the wood was untouched. No damage was done, but the message was clear. I better get these window frames scraped and painted before something serious happens.

Scraping and painting window frames is easy to do, but tedious work, especially for an amateur like me. A professional could do the job at least four times as fast as I can. However, I'd rather do it myself. It saves me the money, and with time to spare, I see no reason to employ somebody to do something I can do myself, even if they can do it faster than I can.

I don't know how much we would have to pay a professional to do this job, but I'm sure a professional would book it down as a full day's job, especially if I were to let him do all the associated cleaning and moving about of plants. If we further assume that the job would be done with all taxes and fees paid, we're talking a pretty big sum of money. My experience from Norway was that a skilled worker would cost me about five times my after tax take home pay as an engineer at a software company.

This means that if I spend five days scraping and painting our window frames, I'm saving money equal to my take home pay as a skilled software engineer. That's a nice little sum of money for sure. However, I expect this to take four days, so I'm saving even more relative to time spent, assuming I would have employed a painter legally. Had we made a private deal with no taxes paid, I could get the job done for half the original offer. That's how much taxes, fees and regulations cost. For every hour the painter spends on doing his work, half an hour is taken away from him by the state.

Conversely, my take home pay was less than half of what my employer paid me back in the days when I was still employed. My tax rate was more like 70%. Had it not been for the overhead of paying taxes, my take home pay would have been three times what it was. So if I had paid no taxes and the painter had paid no taxes, we would have had a situation where one day of his labour could have been paid by me for less than one day's work.

This illustrates the enormous cost of government. What should have been a deal in which I trade less than one full day of my labour for one full day of a painter's labour has been corrupted into me having to spend four days in order to get one day's work of painting done for myself. Imagine all the services we could have paid for with those three days confiscated by government.

When every five days of work translates into only one or two days of purchasing power, we cannot claim to be free. Yet, most people will still claim that government services are free, and that taxation is a great way to pay for all this free stuff, and there simply isn't any way to fix this stupidity. Nothing but frustration will come of any attempt to explain the above to people. It's a waste of time. Rather, we should note the potential hidden in tax evasion, and take advantage of this.

I found a way to reduce my taxes from more than 50% to almost nothing by rearranging my affairs, and I'm sure others can achieve similar result if they put their mind to it. With taxes relentlessly increasing, tax planning and tax evasion becomes key to survival.

Window frames in need of paint