We used to pay a CPA but he was a plug & done kind of guy. Inherited him from DH's parents and DH's single days. His rates went up last year to over $350 to file our basic taxes. I got serious on how to reduce our taxes and met with a tax planner. DH has a rental condo from his single days and I have just been following along with what the accountant does in TurboTax and it has been pretty simple to keep up with.
I think it is fairly easy for someone in this MMM community to figure out taxes and even do a dry-run in TT or TaxAct. It's the planning that is most difficult...
Forums like these have really helped me rethink our taxes. The biggest alone was maxing out our 401k. We were previously did the basic company match because between our employers and our contributions it was $20K per year (we put in $14K and our employers did another $10K or so). You all on this forum helped me realize that we could put away an extra $20K a year of our own money which put us into the 28% marginal tax bracket as a MFJ (let alone saving another 5% on our state taxes). Additionally, I know have the skills to know how to calculate rolling that money over once we FIRE so we can minimize taxes to stay in the 10% tax bracket going forward.
Another thing you fabulous people taught me about was recharacterization. DH did a non-deductible traditional IRA last year (pre-MMM) but we realized that we were paying an extra $1600 in 2013 taxes this year on that money because he had other rollover IRA's.
I had DH call up Schwab to recharacterize that conversion and then googled how to do it in TT before actually doing it officially with Schwab to make sure my numbers matched. It worked!
Finally, (a lot on retirement), DH gets a "pension" as a part of his bonus. Last year, we just took the cash (pre-MMM) and of course, have to pay a 10% penalty on that early withdrawal when filing our 2013 taxes. In February 2014, when given the option again, we realized we could....not only get more money (his company gives you a higher dollar amount if you could keep in a retirement vehicle instead of cashing it out).....and reduce taxes and avoid the early penalty and unlike last year, it did not add to our AGI....but we could just sign up to have it transferred to his Vanguard rollover IRA account (win/win/win/win). We probably $5,500 on that decision alone this year. Sure enough, this year, they sent us a check made out to Vanguard and will find out in another week if it worked.
We recently had a kick ass CPA look over our stuff and other than doing a HSA, he agreed that there was not much more we could do as 2 W-2 earners.
I have a long way to go on tax planning , but am excited to see what else we will master.
Good luck!