5 Tips For Less Stressful Taxes With Your Tax Pro!

Okay, what are some tips for you when working with your tax pro to make it less stressful? That's the question. Um, and this advice will apply whether you use Insight Tax for your tax pro or if you're using somebody else. Um, and I took a couple notes, uh, because I wanted to make sure that this was valuable for you. First one is don't rely on the tax pro to tell you what you need to send them. Um, now a good tax pro is going to tell you what they need you to send them, but there is some stress involved when it's completely abdicated. When our clients abdicate that responsibility to us completely, they seem stressed out a lot. Like, well, what do you need to do? What do you need to send in? Well, if you keep your own lists, then you're less stressed. And by the way, If you're keeping your list and the tax pro, a good tax pro, is keeping their list, hopefully those should match. And if not, that mismatch usually leads to a very valuable conversation. Maybe there's a change that happened for you, and so there's additional tax advice that can be given. So don't rely on them to tell you what you need to send them. Um, keep a file for each year as the documents come in. Store the files in that folder. And, um, it also helps just to keep a list of what you sent to your tax pro the previous year. At our firm, we do that for our clients. We're sending them the ones that don't get us their stuff and ask, we send them that list, right? Like, hey, here's what you sent me last year. Um, if you also have your lists, then again, those should match. And if they don't match, usually that leads to a great valuable conversation. Uh, the next thing that we find stresses out clients is understanding the level of service that you're paying for. Uh, if I showed you our internal processes of how we try to take as many steps as possible to manage expectation, to clearly define what it is they're paying for, even in the contract that clearly defines what they're paying for. Sometimes we still have clients who get frustrated because they feel like we should be doing something for them that they're not actually paying for. So first step is, if you're stressed out with that with your tax pro, check the contract that you signed, see what the level of service is. It could just be there was a false expectation. And then Another form of stress when it comes to understanding the level of services, sometimes there are services that you want to add that would help you reduce stress. Uh, it happens to be a really popular strategy with wealthy people that they leverage their money to save themselves from stress, and that usually results in a great return on investment? Because often I know I find myself stressed in scenarios where I don't have the knowledge or expertise to really adequately do what it is I feel like I need to do. And so paying a professional usually gets me a better result. That's the same idea here. Do you need more services from them because there's things that are stressing you out? Having an expert help you with those things that are stressing you out probably will give you a better result than the wheel turning of trying to learn the processes yourself than doing it yourself. All right, another tip to help make working with your tax pro less stressful: if your tax pro gives you a deadline, chances are there's a very good reason why they are giving you that deadline. So schedule time on your calendar to get whatever it is you need to do on your end to meet the deadline that's been given to you. Um, it's really the best way to make sure that your tax pro can do what you're paying them to do. But a lot of times clients don't tend to schedule those things. They wait to the last minute, they miss the deadlines. It's stressful. Sometimes if you miss the deadline with the tax pro, you end up missing the deadline with the IRS or the state, which leads to unnecessary interest and penalties. So if you're getting a deadline from your tax pro, schedule time in and use that to your advantage so that you don't miss the deadline. Um, I will say this though, I feel like the biggest stress that our clients have when it comes to taxes and working with the tax pro is the unknown of how much they're going to pay in taxes, how much cash they need. Uh, are they— might be looking at something and they have some cash they would preferred to use it for something else instead of taxes, but how much of it can they use? So year-end planning is a really great way to reduce that type of stress. This is where you sit down with your professional before the year ends. We do our tax planning kind of between Halloween and Thanksgiving. And you're going to provide information to the tax pro so that they can do an estimate. And that estimate is going to give you an idea so that if you've oversaved on taxes, you know that you might have some buffer and can use that cash for other things. If you've undersaved, you have— if you're doing it, you know, right after Halloween, you're giving yourself about 6 months to plan ahead and come up with the cash if you end up being short of the estimate that's given to you. So year-end planning is a great way, one of the best, most efficient ways to reduce stress when it comes to working with your tax pro, because really the stress of working with your tax pro is more related to the tax obligation itself. Um, okay, and then, uh, when it comes to the year-end planning and saving for taxes, we find Profit First is a really great system to minimize that stress as well. So Profit First is a cash flow management system Where you periodically and regularly are taking money and setting it aside. In this specific case, setting aside money for your income tax bill. If I'm setting aside money twice a month or once a week, that little bit that I'm setting aside, I don't feel that pain. I can still run the business off the money left over. Compare that to the scenario where a lot of people find themselves in, where it's like, hey, you owe $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 or more. in taxes and they didn't save anything throughout the year. And now they're struggling and, you know, trying to figure out how are they going to come up with that cash all at once. So Profit First is a great way to reduce that stress. We have a ton of resources on Profit First at insighttax.com/wealth. We also have a lot of tax strategies that are going to help you reduce that tax bill so that the unknown number you may feel you have on what you're going to owe in taxes will be lower than whatever it could be if you implement some of these strategies that we have, all free to you. insighttax.com/wealth. Feel free to check it out. Remember, profit is a choice. Have the courage and wisdom to choose it.