Willing to pay someone to teach me how to do my own taxes!

[chickenstick]

Hey folks. I really wanted to do my own taxes this year. They are simple and straightforward, and I really wanted to do things the Mustachian way and save $580 and gain a skill. But they are just complicated enough to where I'm not sure I am doing it right and I'm having trouble self-educating.

I'd much rather pay a FIRE-minded CPA on here $580 to carefully walk through the entire process with me and help me learn a new skill, than just pay random local CPA $580.

Is there anyone willing to help me out?

I'm a W2 employee. I had some freelance work last year. Then I started a single-member LLC halfway through the year. My wife is a partner in a small barely-profitable startup. That's about it. No investments, no real estate, no tricky stuff.

[SeattleCPA]

Here was my suggestion for how to sort of do this from nearly ten years old. So the dollar amounts need to all the adjusted for ten years of inflation:

https://evergreensmallbusiness.com/getting-a-great-tax-return-prepared-for-less-than-100/

TLDR:

Use TurboTax.
Keep your finances simple so no business ownership. No pass-through businesses.
Learn from books.

P.S. It takes CPA firms at least 3-4 years (and sometimes longer) to teach someone with an accounting degree or law degree tax.

[reeshau]

I don't think offering the same amount for intensive 1-to-1 coaching as the standard fee for software-assisted filing is much of a deal.

Two approaches you could take:

Get your taxes prepared this year, but also buy a software of your choice and shadow their work.  If you can replicate their work, then you know what to do, and have a template for next year.  If you need to ask questions, the software will let you be specific.

The tax mills run classes for their new retail employees.  They charge for this, because it's so common to either burn out, or want to just learn for yourself.  So, for $1,000 or so, you can take an H&R Block, or any number of others, seasonal online or in-person course.  Of course, this is no substitute for a CPA, but you can get a feel for what's possible.

And yeah, investments are not a tax problem.  Owning a business makes taxes complicated.

[chickenstick]

Thanks y'all. Feeling a little sheepish at the moment due to underestimating what's involved in this, but you don't know what you don't know.

I am going to go ahead and pay my old CPA to do my taxes this year, but I will work on getting literate. I did not realize owning a company caused complexity!

[ChpBstrd]

Yea, use TurboTax or TaxAct to walk you through each step.

Then print a paper copy of your return.

Then scrutinize where your answers to the questions populated on the forms, which forms were used, where the numbers came from, what the calculations are, etc. Self-teaching can be done relatively quickly.

[Metalcat]

You can always do it yourself and then bring it to an accountant to double check your work.

But why the hell are you paying so much for simple tax filing???

My self employed taxes were kind of complicated and I was paying $350 at most.

[chickenstick]

He used to be closer to $100-200, but over the years the number grew.

Me:
- W2 employee for 90% of my income
- Some freelance work going through single-member LLC for 5-10% of my income

Wife:
- Involved in a General Partnership with her sister for a couple hundred $ per year

[Omy]

I had an accountant do mine for a year or two early on. Now I just parrot what they did by using Turbotax.

[Michael in ABQ]

If you have pass-through entities (i.e. an LLC or sole proprietorship), it's just a matter of filling out a Schedule C for each one. If you are doing basic bookkeeping, you should be able to determine your sales/revenue and then categorize your various expenses. The difference between them is your profit which is what you'll actually pay taxes on. If you're just doing service work for your business your expenses may be very minimal. This is where it's critical to run everything for that business through a separate bank account and credit card. Trying to remember 14 months later if that $100 charge was for something for the business or something for you personally gets pretty tough. It could be your only business expenses are commissions through a platform like Upwork or Fiverr - or merchant processing fees for accepting a payment via credit card, PayPal, QuickBooks, etc.

TurboTax self-employed is $100 or so and should be able to guide you through all of this.

I've been doing my taxes myself with an LLC and a few other side hustles for years. However, when I bought a business and elected to be taxed as an S-Corp I hired a CPA to handle my taxes. Now my personal and business returns total over 100 pages with a dozen or so additional forms and schedules. For my side hustles and smaller single-member LLC I basically just fill out a Schedule C in PDF form and provide it to my CPA. At this point it's simply a matter of copying last year's Schedule C and changing out the numbers from my bookkeeping software (after catching up because I neglected it for months on end).