I’m a recovering CPA.
So I don’t legally “know” what I’m talking about, but I can still remember a bit from when I did. And since this is my least-favorite season of the entire year, it’s also going to become a Savings Tip topic (and the focus of a free course launch I’m working on, see below for details).
You’re Trained to be Focused on the Completely Wrong Thing
The impetus of this post actually happened this morning on the treadmill. There was a commercial for Intuit’s TurboTax…how it guides you through your taxes and then they showed this really fancy image with a guarantee seal. On Inuit’s website you’ll see this front and center.
I don’t want to just single out Intuit. Not at all actually. TaxACT.com’s front page does the same thing.
Intuit’s fine print reads as follows:
If you get a larger refund or smaller tax due from another tax preparation method, we’ll refund the applicable TurboTax federal and/or state purchase price paid. TurboTax Federal Free Edition customers are entitled to a payment of $14.95 and a refund of your state purchase price paid.
Fair enough.
TaxACT’s fine print re: their guarantee sheds a bit more light on the problem:
If you get a larger refund or smaller tax due from another tax preparation method with the same data, we will refund the applicable product price you paid for your TaxACT Deluxe federal return.
Emphasis mine.
I won’t even go into H&R Block’s “Instant Refund Anticipation Loans.” Nasty — and a whole other story.
The focus is on that carrot dangling out in front of you. Your own money that you paid to the government in anticipation of your tax liability — your tax refund.
Even Trained Accountants Get it Wrong and Fall For the…Indoctrination :)
Back when I worked for a large accounting firm (don’t get the idea that I have tons of experience doing that — I lasted 10 LONG months), I remember sitting around the table in the cafeteria of our client. It was tax season and I was probably complaining about this very thing. One of my colleagues — a CPA said something along the lines of:
Oh, I didn’t pay any taxes this year. I got a refund.
I about lost my lunch.
If that same concept can happen to someone who passed the Reg section of the CPA exam, it certainly happens to your average Joe the…Piano Tuner.
What was the problem with my colleague’s statement? Even if they had just slipped up and really meant to say that they didn’t need to pay any additional taxes for the year…it was still alarming.
Just to be 100% clear.
1) You earn money.
2) You pay income taxes that are either withheld from your paycheck automatically (so you’re not as aware of the expense, removing you psychologically from it and encouraging just the problem we’re discussing here — a HUGE lack of awareness) or you’re required to file quarterly estimates.
3) By April 15 of each year, you calculate what you actually owe and either pay more (because your estimates weren’t enough) or you’re paid a refund (because you paid too much).
Unless you literally did not have a tax liability that year, you paid taxes. You may not have a tax liability if:
1) You’re dead or,
2) You earned only a small amount of income.
3) You have tons and tons of kids :)
I’m grossly simplifying with the above three points.
So know this: you very likely pay taxes every single year.
And I’m not even talking about the FICA (Social Security & Medicare) taxes that you can’t avoid (re: minimize) much at all if you’re a wage worker. Even if you did fall into #2 or #3 above, you still paid almost 8% of your wage in FICA. (By the way, your employer paid another almost 8% to FICA as well — the money which they just might pay to you if they weren’t paying it to the government, so you can choose to see that as a tax you pay as well).
You pay taxes. Every year of your life. And when you die, you pay again. Don’t let me ever hear you say, “Oh, I didn’t pay taxes this year — I got a refund.” Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
This is Not About Tax Policy. It’s About Your Life’s Single Biggest Expense
This is not about political leanings, or tax policy. It’s about what will likely be (or already has become, and will only continue to be) the single largest expense of your entire life.
I’m guilty as charged. These Savings Tips that I’ve written have ranged from saving time and money with dinner groups to 29 Ways to Save a Fortune on Your Energy Bill.
If I were doing these tips according to bottom-line affecting expenditures, I’d probably be writing about tax savings two out of every five times. For almost everyone.
Going Back to the Refund Focus. Which Way Are You Facing?
At the beginning here I established that we’re trained to be refund-focused. With tax compliance software we’re trained to drop in data (what we’ve done) and have the computer spit out what we owe or are owed. We’re complying. We’re facing backward.
Over a year ago I wrote about preferring head-on to rear-end collisions (the metaphor breaks down quickly in real life, but you get my point) when it comes to making spending decisions. You want to be proactively looking forward and acting — not looking backward and reacting.
Taxes are the exact. same. way.
Remember TaxACT’s guarantee from above? How they mentioned the same data? They’re basically saying that their software will return the same result as another software because both softwares do an excellent job of looking back, crunching the numbers, considering the rules and spitting out the liability. Hang on to that thought.
If Things Were Simpler, It’d Be Easier. But They’re Not, so Let’s Move On
We can lament and moan (I do my share of it) about how economically costly tax compliance is. How it’s a huge drain (as a whole) on the economy with no value-add. How a client I worked on employed 35 people full-time to make sure their M-1 (that’s a C-Corporation’s return, that has maybe…12 boxes to fill out) was correct…
But we won’t.
Things aren’t simple. Life is complex. In honor of the season premier of Lost tonight, I’m going to say it’s a lot like that black cloud that haunts the island. It’s always there. Nobody knows what it is or how it works. And it kills you.
At the end of Lost this season, perhaps we’ll know how it works. At the end of this tax season, we still won’t know how the tax code works.
So, let’s just get comfortable with the idea that the tax code will always be complex.
Even for those situations where the tax scenario really is simple, we have divergent voices. The New York Times wrote a very interesting article days ago, “Why Can’t the I.R.S. Help Fill in the Blanks?” that cast some of the large tax preparation software backers in a negative light.
The gist: California uses ReadyReturn, where they send eligible Californians a pre-filled return. The data can then be validated by the person, but it “gets the ball rolling”. It costs the state $.34 to process a ReadyReturn, while a paper return filed in the traditional way costs $2.59 (not including the taxpayer’s savings in both time and possibly money).
The tax preparation software lobby pushes against this for obvious reasons. Intuit’s response is here.
Whichever side of that debate you’re on, it’s clear that there are interests hard at work on both sides, furthering their own agenda. What I want you to take away from this Savings Tip is that you need to have your own agenda.
What To Do About Your Single Largest Expense
The agenda is simple. Minimize it. Minimize your tax liability. Educate yourself.
My real awakening to this situation happened last year during preparation of our 2008 personal return. Before I get into that, let me tell you about my brother-in-law, Casey.
Casey is a tax preparation…guru? Yeah, guru’s the right word. He might be partially insane as well — he loves this stuff. Absolutely loves it. I’ve seen him become giddy over some strategy. It’s a sight to behold.
He’s also a straight-arrow. He deals in blacks and whites. Prior to using Casey, I used another CPA to prepare my taxes and heaven only knows how much money I overpaid (he was lousy, and I should have fired him immediately. Plenty of warning signs told me as much). This was all apparent once Casey got a hold of my tax documents for the 2008 return.
It’s the kind of thing where taking an expense here instead of there saved me over $10,000. I’ve been trained in taxes. The Reg section of the CPA exam was my shining moment (a 94 baby! Nothing to show for it now). I had class after class in school. I know enough to know that I need help.
$10,000 (and change)!
We used the money to help us pay down the mortgage.
But that money would have been gone. Forever. There’s literally nothing that you’re given in return for the extra you pay on your taxes. You are flushing money down the toilet. Stop doing that.
Casey’s in the know about this stuff though. He soaks it up. He prepares return after return and sees different situations. He dives into the tax code — discusses strategies and knows the forms inside and out. He’s a phenomenal resource.
I don’t think he’d want me to disclose what it cost me to have him prepare our 2008 taxes, but I will say it was a bargain (and I didn’t get any family discount :). An absolute, no-brainer bargain.
But here’s where the real value comes. Casey now can sit down with me and help me look forward and begin planning. For the 2008 return, he hadn’t seen anything going on prior to having my documents in hand. He was forced to comply and we still did phenomenal.
So the real value comes in being able to plan and structure things in such a way that your tax bill is minimized. Having that ability is, as Michael Scott (The Office) would say, “Incalclacable.”
I led into this talking about tax preparation software. I think, on net, it’s a positive thing. But don’t be deceived. No consumer-facing software is forward-looking. No tax prep software would have told me that I just needed to take my health expense here instead of there. It would have just accepted my answer and moved on. Did you hear that flushing sound? :)
The savings we found had to do with how we were handling health insurance premiums in relation to adjusted gross income (AGI) that was on a threshold of causing phaseouts for Roth contributions, child tax credits, and I believe some itemized deductions. Sound like a foreign language to you? Embrace it.
Remember, you need to have your own tax policy: Educate yourself. Pay as little as possible and use the savings to reach your financial goals.
And please, please, please people: Do not turn this into some raging political discussion. I’m not talking about tax policy. I’m talking about taking the tax hand you’ve been dealt and proactively making the most of it.
This is the end-all, be-all savings tip really. Because what it represents is an eternal spring of information to help you save money on virtually every aspect of your life.
I fully intended to write a completely different money saving tip for today, but on my way into the office, I had a complete change of direction.