Make next June boring

What the last 2 weeks of June say about the other 50

Jun 18, 2026

Ok, it’s a career hazard, I’m on the receiving end of a scramble. June often feels like a busy season. Deep down it’s a report card.

It’s not about how organised you are as a person, but on whether your financial life has a system for the other fifty weeks of the year. The scramble in June is the symptom. The missing structure is the cause.

If you are reading this mid-scramble, good. The pain is real right now, which makes it the perfect moment to actually fix it.

This may contain: a stack of coins next to an alarm clock with the word tax written on it

Here is what the scramble looks like in practice

Receipts and tax invoices being hunted across email threads and downloads folders. Insurances being renewed without price comparisons. A super contribution decision made in the final week (so not yet!), without properly checking what has already gone in this year (or as so many are doing right now - checking the last 5 years). Deductions you were entitled to, gone because the evidence is gone with them.

I see this every year. The first conversation of the year is spent reconstructing what happened, not planning what comes next. Decisions that deserved months of thinking get compressed into days. And at the end of it all, I am sure there is a whisper of a “vow” to do this better next year. Which was made last year. And the year before.

The reframe that matters

Tax planning and tax returns are different activities. Planning happens during the year, preferably each quarter (at a minimum) in the ordinary course of running your financial life. Your tax return becomes the sum of all the parts throughout the year to this point and the finishing touches ideally occur in June.

The goal is not to be better organised in June. The goal is to make June the most boring fortnight of your financial year.

What to actually do, while it is still fresh

The best time to fix this is now, not January, when the memory has faded and the urgency is gone.

Run a post-mortem on this June while it is still raw. Write down exactly what you scrambled for. That list sets the scene for your system design brief. To make this easier, we’ve created an end of financial year “post-mortem” companion to this substack to get you started. Please check it out 👇

If this is the year for you, create one single digital folder and an email forwarding rule. You want to do this for anything tax related or a possible deduction that you need to check with your accountant. Nothing more elaborate than that. Elaborate systems are the ones that get abandoned - usually because once we set them up and don’t use them often enough we forget their purpose!

My suggestion from here, like a health check or a skin check, schedule two fixed dates: a February planning check covering super, deductions, and timing, and an April conversation with your financial planner or accountant. Not June. April.😉

Here’s the hot tip - sometimes we are all busy just doing the doing. Change the brief you give your adviser. Ask for a next-year conversation, not just a last-year one. What should I be thinking about before 30 June next year? That question, asked in April, is worth far more than the same one asked on the 28th of June.

EOFY Post Mortem

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What changes when the system exists

There is a meaningful difference between being a taxpayer who survives June every year and being someone whose affairs are simply in order. The second person is not more talented or more disciplined. They’ve just built a rhythm and a system.

June becomes calm. Decisions get made early, with the full menu of options still available. The dread disappears, not because June matters less, but because it stops being a crisis.

Make next June boring. The benefit lands in every other month.

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