Jolene Brink writes of her tax rituals in Tax Day Is My New Year’s Eve, on The Billfold.

She describes how she sets the scene for her adult, money, making-sense work of doing her taxes. She sees potential in the ritualizing of these otherwise painful (if not terrifying) yearly accounting work.

What would happen if we transformed our collective anxiety around April 15 into a different kind of ritual? Instead of vilifying the collective process of sorting and organizing our finances, what if we celebrated the work completed, while making goals for the new tax year? What if we took a careful look at the story money played in our lives last year, and decided if that’s the story we want to keep telling?

She made rituals of difficult conversations around money and planning — by setting the time for them around radio broadcasts of A Prairie Home Companion. These tough conversations — about how to spend money, how to save money, how to deal with big expenses, became “Love Money nights” for the couple.

She wants to go software-free next year, to up her skills even further, to be a total master of her own money.