Lakedog
Full time employment: Posting here.
- Joined
- May 23, 2007
- Messages
- 984
Lakedog, if you don't mind saying, why would that be? I'd think the tax-software folks would have more time and resources to keep up with tax laws, than the average person would. Actually I think you've hit on an important point, since the main reason we keep paying the CPAs is that we "don't know what we don't know" about the tax code--and they, supposedly, do. We believe strongly in paying for specialized knowledge...not for poking data into spreadsheets, which I can do as well as anybody.
We do have a rental property, with various carry-over losses, depreciation, and so on. Other than that, our situation is pretty straightforward.
Once you are accustomed to doing your own taxes, it is relatively simple to keep up with changes from year to year. The key is getting up to speed initially (if you have not been preparing your own). Plus, as someone (CyclingInvestor?) mentioned, I do not trust someone else or tax software to catch everything.
I cannot remember which publication did the comparison, but when the same numbers were put into three different tax programs, the result was three different answers. My thinking is that if I don't keep up with the tax code, how would I know whether a CPA or tax software did an acceptable job? In addition, I could just never bring myself to pay someone to do my taxes when I would have to furnish all of the information required anyway -- gathering the info is the time consuming part.