You can always make more money, but you can't make more time.

What does her work look like?

Abbigail does a little of everything. She's the dance captain in a show at Paris Las Vegas, teaches kids dance two nights a week, coaches fitness, emcees slot tournaments at the Wynn, acts, and once officiated a wedding-chapel gig she showed up to without knowing the plan.

A text comes in asking if she's free tomorrow, she says yes, and she figures out the rest when she gets there. A Jill of all trades, in her words.

Why was tax time so hard?

That variety is the fun, but it also makes tax time brutal. Her income lands almost exactly 50/50 between W-2 and 1099 work, roughly ten 1099s and ten W-2s in a single year. Reconciling all of it, across multiple bank accounts and credit cards, is a lot to ask of someone who's always on the move.

She got her first real look at that work doing her mom's taxes. When she first moved to Vegas and didn't have many gigs yet, her mom paid her to organize expenses: download the monthly statements, export them to CSV, delete the columns that would break the spreadsheet upload, then check every row. Income in one pile, expenses in another, month after month, account after account.

Eventually it all becomes blurry and I can't look at it anymore and I get overwhelmed. And then there were times that I called [my mom] crying, telling her that I couldn't do it anymore.

What didn't she know?

She'd been told that if you use something for work you can write it off, but with no clear guidelines and no one to ask, she was mostly guessing. Was a purchase personal or business? What actually counts as a deduction? Googling every question one at a time wasn't an answer.

For a while she filed with TurboTax, on the phone with her mom the entire time to be sure she was doing it right. TurboTax asked her questions as if she already knew the answers. She didn't.

What does her tax setup look like now?

She found Keeper right as she was going full time into gig life. It explained things in plain language, with a “what is this for?” prompt on anything that didn't make sense, so she could learn as she went.

The part she loved was finally being able to ask. As a performer under contract she has to keep up a certain level of fitness, so if the dance classes she pays for count, why not the gym? Keeper's chat told her it's a specific circumstance, but yes, it's possible, and she qualifies. A clear answer to a genuinely gray question.

Now the write-offs mostly find themselves: her Casting Networks subscription for audition submissions, Spotify for the music she teaches to, her website hosting, Capezio and tights, the miles she puts on her car driving gig to gig, even a coffee with a fellow performer while they planned a show.

Within a couple minutes of signing up for Keeper, it found me a few hundred dollars worth of deductions.

What changed?

The biggest win was time: roughly 40 hours she used to spend categorizing expenses in spreadsheets. As she puts it, you can always make more money, but you can't make more time.

She tracks everything in real time now instead of rebuilding a whole year from memory every spring, and filing stopped feeling like something she had to survive.