Peter Vander WallFounder driving creative community growth

If you're still charging $500 to file a tax return, you are LOSING soooo much money

Name: If you're still charging $500 to file a tax return, you are LOSING soooo much money
Uploaded: 2025-03-31T13:04:16+00:00
Duration: 35 s
Channel: Peter Vander Wall
Description: Peter Vander Wall argues that $500 for a tax return leaves almost nothing after labor costs. At $30-50 per hour for eight hours of work, you're looking…

31 Mar 2025 · 1 min

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0:35

Peter Vander Wall argues that $500 for a tax return leaves almost nothing after labor costs. At $30-50 per hour for eight hours of work, you're looking at $300-400 in expenses and a 20% margin before overhead, which strangles growth for solo practitioners.

Questions this video answers

$30–$50 per hour

About eight hours

About $300–$400 in labor costs

Approximately 20%

Chapters

If you're still charging 500 bucks to file a tax return, you are losing so much money to get a good CPA or EA to prepare the tax return, you're probably spending 30 to 50 bucks an hour, and they'll probably take about eight hours to prepare. Just like a moderately complex business return that's including the emails back and forth with the client and collecting documents and all that stuff. So that means you're spending three or four hundred bucks just on labor, and now you're only at a 20% profit margin before you even cover overhead. If you're a solo operator or maybe a very small team, you might think think that this is a competitive advantage, but realistically, it's just keeping your business down because your profit margin is so squeezed.