The Book
Tax Insight is offering you the Tax Insight book for $34.95 $29.95. Jam-packed full of relevant, up-to-date strategies. Discover just one strategy and you’ll likely save ten times the cost of the book itself. Taxes are one of the Big Win expenses of your life. Take them seriously.
Taxes are your single biggest barrier in reaching your financial goals.
Over your lifetime, you’ll send more money to Washington D.C. than you do for food, clothing, and even shelter.
Can I repeat myself already? Taxes are your biggest financial barrier.
And the odds are that you’ve ignored that fact for a long time. I’m guilty of the same thing.
I’ve been guilty of worrying about the price of gas going up a dime, or the cost of milk increasing 10%, or whether my Netflix subscription ($7/month) is really worth it. Those concerns aren’t totally misguided, they’re just wildly unimportant when compared to my tax bill.
We’ll sit and read books about how to negotiate a raise, be more productive, start a business, earn some freelance income, etc. — all so we can scrape together a few hundred dollars more per month (before taxes, of course).
But when April 15th rolls around, we all just hand our tax data to our tax preparer, or tax preparation software, and then go stick our heads in the sand, hoping Uncle Sam is gracious enough this year to let us have some of our withholdings back.
Excuse me while I try to keep my lunch down.
When you educate yourself about your taxes, you equip yourself with money-saving tactics that go way past saving ten cents on gas, or clipping coupons to double up on detergent at half the price. With taxes, you’re staring at significant savings. Hundreds–even thousands of dollars each year.
I had a very negative experience that finally brought this point home for me. An experience that finally made me realize that taxes are a huge deal.
As a newbie entrepreneur, by default, I found my local CPA and had him prepare my taxes for 2007. It didn’t take me long to realize he was simply plugging numbers into his own tax preparation software and spitting something out on my behalf. Change is difficult, and it took me a year and a half to finally pull the trigger and fire him. (To this day I still regret that it took me as long as it did).
Luckily, I found Casey (author of Tax Insight). My old tax preparer had already filed my business returns for 2008, but I told him I had someone else handling my personal return. Casey gave the business returns a thorough workover and was dismayed–to say the least.
Casey amended one of the business returns. Here’s what that meant:
- The business recognized a bit more income.
- This allowed me to deduct significant health insurance premiums that would have otherwise been lost.
- We used a few tax sheltering vehicles between me and Julie (one of us was allowed to do a Roth, another a traditional IRA).
- We were able to lower our AGI and win back some credits and deductions that had been phased out.
The end result? A tax savings of $20,000.
(When I originally wrote about this on YNAB’s blog, I had said it was $10,000. Casey read that and informed me my number was way off. I stand corrected. But even at $10,000, the point is still made.)
What did $20,000 buy me? I put it toward the mortgage. So yes, the principle on my house dropped $20,000, but the savings don’t stop there. Over the next ten years we’ll save over $9,000 in interest.
It was a paper move. It was merely HOW we filed things. It was putting an expense here on this form, instead of there, on that form.
A savings of $29,000.
I was ecstatic.
Then terrified.
Doesn’t that terrify you?
The odds are that you’re overpaying by hundreds, even thousands of dollars — leaving that money on the table — not even aware of it.
It’s not just about dollars, it’s about what ELSE you could be doing with those dollars. We decided to throw that windfall at the mortgage, but what if you could pay down significant credit card debt, finance a year of your kids’ college, or just eat at your favorite restaurant a little more often?
Overpaying your taxes is one of the deadliest financial sins. Do something about it!
Study the strategies in Tax Insight (pay close attention to the strategies where you can “double dip” — pages 64 and 80 come immediately to mind) and avoid just the situation I found myself in — uninformed and throwing dollars to the winds of hope.
You have been ignoring your tax situation at your financial peril.
You fall into one of three categories:
1) You use tax preparation software. This can be great. It’s automated, takes less time, and is easy. The problem is that it only looks at the past. However, if you arm yourself with the knowledge found in Tax Insight, you can do quite well. You’ll understand the implications of the answers you’re providing your tax software, and that will allow you to recognize opportunities for tax savings.
2) You’ve worked with a tax preparer in the past, and had a negative experience. This is exactly what happened to me. You have a bad taste in your mouth, just like I did. Perhaps that’s the reason you worked through a 7-day course on taxes — you want to become your own expert. Tax Insights make you that expert.
3) You’re working with a tax preparer now, and couldn’t be happier. Hopefully for at least some of you, this is the case. Your tax preparer is doing fantastic work, you trust them, and you feel you’re really getting your money’s worth. Tax Insight is poised to help you in this situation as well. Being aware of tax strategies on your own can make your preparer that much more effective (and save you money because your return will take less time!). I’m not saying you should be teaching them tax strategies, but if you recognize that there’s a tax opportunity, you can go to your preparer for confirmation/more knowledge. You and your preparer together will be a tax-minimization force to be reckoned with!
If you were to sit down with a tax preparer today and discuss these strategies in person, it would take about six hours and be extremely expensive! (Hundreds of dollars if you talked so fast that you couldn’t be understood). Paying a fraction of the cost for advice from the same source is a steal.
Along the same vein, if you decided to dig around and find relevant tax strategies on your own, the cost of time would be significant. You’d run into poor advice and mountains of out-of-date information.
If Tax Insight doesn’t reveal at least one strategy that saves you 10 times its cost on this year’s tax bill, shoot me an email and ask for a refund. I’ll refund your purchase and you keep the book. That guarantee is good as long as I have a pulse.
 (Digital Download) or purchase a hard copy ($34.95 + shipping) |
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Buy the book. It will pay for itself many times over. You’ll have more money and less stress.
Good luck with your taxes! You know you’ll need it ;)
