One of the unusual perks offered by my husband’s employer is that they will pay for a CPA to do our taxes the first year. Their reasoning? His employer paid for our relocation to the Bay Area, but rather than give us a lump sum to cover the expenses or cash reimbursement, the company’s policy is to pay for all relocation expenses and then “gross up” the total to cover any taxes, which is then included in the W-2 form. In case the relocation amount is determined to be insufficient to cover the taxes on it, the company will actually make an adjustment and gross up the relocation amount even further to cover any remaining taxes.

This is the first time I’ve ever heard of a company offering a benefit like this to its employees. Granted, it’s only offered the first year, but they’ve scheduled CPAs from two local firms (one from Ernst & Young) to come to to campus every day for two weeks so that we can set up an appointment conveniently. Alternatively, the company will reimburse us up to $500 if we decide to use our own CPA. The only potential risk is that they can’t guarantee our taxes will be filed in time, so there’s always a possibility that we’ll have to file for an extension.

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Earnings on this site ended 2006 strongly. After subtracting $24.95 in expenses (comprised of a $9.95 monthly hosting fee and $15 to renew the domain name another year), earnings totaled $265.81 in December. In 2006, my first year of blogging, I earned a total of $772.49. I began this site with 42 visitors in January and ended with nearly 12,500 visitors in December.

I’ve been testing out a really elegant Excel add-in called Bonavista Microcharts (review forthcoming), based on Edward Tufte’s fine work on sparklines and thought I’d use it to present a summary of my revenue sources as they changed over time:

As you can see, Adsense still comprises a good chunk of my income from this site, although it’s no longer the source of the majority. I really now only use the first four affiliates listed, having decided that Emigrant Direct was too much trouble to deal with. (I also have some very paltry earnings from Amazon that I haven’t included because it’s unclear when I’ll break the $10 threshold required for a payout.)

So thank you, everyone, for making 2006 such a fun year! It’s been very interesting to watch the growth and (re-)learn how the internet integrates and disperses ideas.

Look forward to the plenty of things I plan to share in 2007!

Happy New Year, everyone! I’m spending most of tomorrow traveling back home after visiting family. More updates soon.