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?

When I get ready to do my taxes each year, I don’t go to a tax accountant or download forms off the IRS website. Instead, I buy TurboTax and enjoy the pleasure of doing it myself with the ease of not entirely doing it myself.

Tax time is looming. You’ve started gathering your papers together. But then what? Well, there are four basic choices, and I’ll give an overview of those here, and talk about them in more detail in later blogs.

Your Accountant

You’ve heard about the Democrats’ 100 Hours. But how will it affect your taxes?

Of course, if you’re someone who’s going to benefit from the minimum wage increase the Democrats passed, the income listed on your income taxes will change - it will go up. Yay!

(This is part 2. Don’t forget to check out part 1, too: Tax Preparation: Get Your Tax Papers Together, Part 1).

Before you start doing your actual taxes, make sure you’ve got everything you need. Even if you decide to use a tax preparer rather than doing them yourself, you’ll still need to do this step.

Do you have a phone bill? Chances are, you do - and if you do, you can claim a tax credit on this year’s tax form. Turns out there’s an old tax that we’ve all been paying on our phone bill every month, and the Treasury Department has decided it’s no longer valid. So first of all, the phone company’s going to stop charging that tax. Yay! Even better, the government is giving a tax refund. It’s based on how many exemptions you claim, and ranges from $30 up to $60.