What are you doing right now?

[BackLoafRiver]

How hard is it to do your own taxes? For the past 9 years, I had H & R Block do them since I had 2 W-2's. Thought about getting Turbo Tax to do it myself. Not sure if it is worth the effort.

[severine]

TurboTax is easy, even with the small business stuff that I have to do. Guides you through it all. Don't do H&R block... heck, a CPA is better than they are. They over-charged us and we over-paid. Granted, that's when we owned rental property, but we paid over $300 to have our taxes prepared and the next year when we saw a private accountant, it was only a little over $100 and we owed far less than the year before. After we sold the rental property, our accountant suggested doing our taxes by ourselves again because she didn't want to take our money for something I could do myself.

[Warp Daddy]

When i ran a parallel business in consulting for 20 yrs and had overhead in addition to my fulltime University work i used Turbo ,

Now being retired i do MY own 'commando style" ie no electronic assistance -- but then again i'm into that kinda thing . Not really hard at all if u r organized

[o3jeff]

I prefer to go to someone and have mine done. While Turbo Tax will ask you the general questions and if you answer no it just moves onto the next one whereas a good accountant will ask more questions to confirm if you qualify or not. For the $75(single) I get charged = piece of mind

[BackLoafRiver]

Thanks for all the feedback. Maybe I should have started a separate thread.

This is one of my last 7 - 9:00 Tuesdays of the year. Basketball season is coming to a screeching halt soon and I can't wait. Just getting some odds and ends done before I have some small group instruction in 20 minutes.

[drjeff]

CPA for my household.

With regular wages, dividend wages, captial gains/loss issues, a household employee, and property taxes in a couple of states, I will wholey admit that I'm not as well versed in the tax code and it's year to year changes as I would feel that I need to be to make sure that I'm keeping as much of my hard earned $$ (and not giving any extra $$ to our elected officials to spend as they see fit). Plus, throughout the year my wife and I are having regular conversations with out CPA to make sure that we're up to date on our quarterlies so we don't end up with a big suprise at the end of the year (Frankly I'd much rather end the year as close nothing owed/no refund as possible, that way I know that I was able to manage as much of my $$ LEGALLY all year, rather than letting the gov't "borrow" some extra that I could have had throughout the year!)

[severine]

Yeah, I know, it's better to end even... but we haven't been so great about putting money away so the refund works better for us... Easier to not touch when it's a big chunk getting put in the bank instead of little dribs and drabs all year for us.

Pre-businesses/rental property, I did our taxes by hand every year. If you don't have a lot to figure out, it's easy enough to do. Once I'm done with my direct sales gig, I think I'll go back to doing taxes by hand.

Apparently, there's a spider I need to go kill...

[WJenness]

Ugh, I think I'm liable to owe quite a bit this year... haven't done the math yet though.

Got laid off in January, I don't think they took taxes out of my severence / vacation time they paid me for, I think I was claiming too many exemptions when I started the new job, and I've been doing some contract work for a part time job for the last few months. This could be ugly.

-w

[Warp Daddy]

Agree with doc I DON"T LIKE SURPRISES of the financial kind so that's why i scope stuff out early so i either owe them a small amt or they owe me a SMALL amt . I don;t like giving INTEREST FREE loans

Being retired i have to do quarterlies on my state taxes

[Warp Daddy]

OK,, gotta go pump iron n'sweat my arse off at the gym @10.