Tax Preparation Services: Is It Worth It To Pay?
You’ve seen or heard the ads for these tax preparation services - you can go in, they’ll walk you through doing your taxes and even give you your refund up front. Sounds like a great deal, right? Well, you know what they say about things that sound too good to be true. Check the fine print: you have to pay quite a bit of money for them to essentially fill out the forms in the software for you (you provide the answers, after all), and don’t think you’re getting that quick refund for free, either. For the benefit of getting your refund on the same day, you of course have to pay. And why would you do that, if you could wait another two or three weeks and get your entire refund instead of only part of it?
But what if you don’t have a computer at home or feel like you need a person there to walk you through it and you don’t have an accountant? What if you really don’t feel confident about your math skills and are afraid of doing it on paper? My first suggestion would be seeing if any of your friends has a computer they’d let you use to do your taxes, or if there’s a community group that has computers for use - they might jump at the chance to add another service by installing TurboTax or TaxCut on their machines.
Failing that, then maybe one of these tax preparation services would be the best option for you. But before you walk in the door, do some comparison shopping. Call up the different tax preparation services (or better yet, use a library computer and check them out online - then you can Google for reviews of the places and see other people’s opinions, too) and ask how much they charge. Make sure that you have the option of waiting for your refund - you can at least save on the fees charged by getting it upfront. Ask each place what their process is and what additional fees might be added on. For instance, if you get partway through and realize you left some papers at home, will you be charged extra to finish at a later date? Also, do they do e-filing? Is there an extra charge for e-filing? Do they offer paper filing at a lower cost, or is e-filing the only option?
Watching your hard-earned money disappear from your paycheck in taxes is hard enough. Don’t hand any more over to tax preparation services than you have to.
