No, kidding. And how do you pay your government? Where does your government get money to build roads, schools, hospitals??

By the way, nice article. Here is a good explanation of the AMT, perhaps it helps anyone. http://www.maxi-pedia.com/alternate+alternative+minimum+tax+AMT

[...] encourage you to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Earlier this month, I mentioned that I haven’t prepared my own taxes since 2001. I pay somebody else to do them. I did them on my own for fourteen years before they became too [...]

[...] JD gives a brief overview of the Alternative Minimum Tax. [...]

[...] Get Rich Slowly – A Brief Overview of the Alternative Minimum Tax [...]

Then I bought a business and came face to face with depreciation and amortization. AMT. Loss carry-over. I read the codes and the forms and the instructions. I researched it on-line. I spent hours trying to learn this stuff, and my brain just hurt.

This engineer met her match at the complicated end of the income tax code and handed it all over to an excellent CPA. Just as I had spent my career getting really good at what I do, she had spent hers learning the arcanity (arcaness?) of taxes. She rocks, rolls AND saves me money.

Sometimes it is totally worth it to pay an expert to do the work that isn’t your specialty. This is one of those times for me.

Your situation sounds pretty simple to do. Give Tax Cut a try ($20.00 on the web). It is produced by HR Block, very simple to use and is much cheaper than Turbo Tax. When finished, print your return(do not file electronically, more $$), mail it in and your all set. I bet it will take you about 3-4 hours. I used to do my own paper returns but it took over 20 hours. I started using this software and cut that time in half. Also there are no math errors. I would never use an accountant. We all have to pay taxes and should not have to hire a 3rd party ($400) to do this for us. my 2cents.

My husband and I have many deductions and Tax Act’s free service has handled them all. (The first year I did my taxes on paper too, just to verify Tax Act was accurate.)

Because i are a english major, i are not a accountant, the whole subject leaves me with my head spinning. I have my returns prepared by a tax lawyer, who charges significantly less than the CPA I hired when I ran an incorporated business and who saves me significantly more. She (lawyer) normally charges about $400, but that includes the dribs & drabs of legal advice she also has provided over the year. She sends one statement in April that covers the entire year’s worth of legal advice, tax advice, and tax preparation. So far, I’ve had no problem paying her out of the refunds she’s obtained from the state and the feds, which cover her fees and give me an excellent running head start on funding the Roth IRA.

I had that problem before and had to get forms from each state. When I did it, there were special forms for people who had lived in more than one state within the year.

If it’s possible (or if anyone else wants to chime in)…maybe you could include some tips about which people should really consider getting a tax guy and which of us should just suck it up and do it ourselves.

For example, I’m single with no dependents, just one income, with student loans and a mortgage, and no other investments….so I’ve always figured my taxes were simple enough to do myself, but who knows, maybe I’m missing some big deductions?

How complicated do your finances have to be before you should get outside help to make sure you’re getting all the rewards?

Best Wishes,
D4L

Turbotax is partially fixed for the last-minute AMT changes, so it looked like we would have paid over $1k before the changes, and we get over $2k back now. We got hit with AMT several years ago when we exercised some (startup dot-com) stock options, but we got AMT credits in subsequent years (done this year), which reduced our federal taxes for those years.

We pay a CPA about $400 a year to do our taxes which includes fancy stuff due to our rental income, rental expenses and depreciation, etc. We have been using the same CPA for about 7 years and we are very happy with the service. His price depends on the number of forms/schedules.

I learned a lot from him through the years and caught little mistakes.

That said, I have also many times used the pencil-and-paper “check if you owe AMT” checklist in the 1040 booklet.

I consulted TurboTax online last year, and while it did help, it also seemed unable to handle some mutual fund transactions. (I blogged about the details at http://jenk.livejournal.com/tag/taxes – we ended up owing $1.)

I will probably do the manual-with-online help method again next year.

One year I thought we might come out better if we used a professional. After all, he’d know all the loopholes, right? Wrong. We were going to owe money! With three children and one income! I went back to doing it myself, and I’ve never regretted it.

This merits real consideration. This is not some wacko idea, but a real potential alternative to our current system.

Check it out!