Everybody loves thinking about, getting paperwork together for, doing, and paying their taxes, right? Yeah. About what I thought. But, we all have to do it every year. Every. Single. Year. Of course, if you find great joy in doing your taxes yourself each year, I don’t want to stand between you and happiness.
From my perspective, doing taxes for clients is an integral part of helping you manage your financial life, and so part of the comprehensive services I offer is helping you file your taxes each year. As an Enrolled Agent (EA), I’ve passed tax exams to demonstrate my knowledge and am able to represent taxpayers before the IRS. There are a few points I want to raise about this important, though often overlooked, area of your finances.
First, I think that taking tax implications into account is a key part of financial planning and investment management. That means not always chasing the biggest tax return in a given year if it will have a negative effect on your retirement or other goals.
Second, I can aid in the process of gathering most of the necessary documents with you. Some documents I can collect for you, particularly those that are investment-related. But more importantly, I can help map out all the documents you need to gather up and keep us on track – I dislike scrambling to finish things last minute just as much as the next person.
Third, in the interest of transparency, I must note that I’m not a CPA or tax attorney. There will be questions and issues that fall outside my circle of competency, and at that point we’ll need to consult an expert. However, I don’t want to just punt on the issue and leave you to find someone else on your own. I see it as my job to help identify that outside expert and (to the extent you are comfortable with it), help communicate with them in order to get the question addressed. Put simply: if I don’t know the answer to a question, it’s my job to help get you the answer.