Finally!! tax season arrives.....

i never got any money back when i went to h & r block but if i do them online i get money back lol.. i use taxact.com and they are great.. i think you only have to pay if you are getting the check direct deposited etc.. usually like 16 bucks

My mom always did her taxes herself and I remember how quiet we had to be while she was doing them. And we didn't dare distrub her. So, that's one reason why I hand my taxes off to an expert that knows all the in's and out's. I don't want my family to be intimidated while I try to muddle through them. Plus, my mom's a numbers person and I'm not, neither is my husband. It saves me load of time, especially in the last three years since I have had my own homebased business. The good thing is the great deductions I get for having my own business. So, I'm pulling my info together to send off to my tax preparer and not worry about it.

I'm a cheapskate so I prepare my own tax returns and mail them in. Sometimes, we get back thousands of dollars, but I'm never in THAT big a hurry to receive it so I'll save the money. Yeah, yeah, those of you who do your own taxes know that filing online is cheap... it's like $10.00 or so to file to the IRS online but, hey! I'd rather have that money in MY pocket, not the IRS's and not a tax preparer's pocket! Doing your own tax returns is not hard. Most people seem intimidated by it but, if you take one line at a time and do as it says, it's really easy! The IRS's online site has all the information, booklets, forms, etc. that you need. Well, actually, now that my husband is fully self-employed now, I'll probably wait until the last day to file since we'll be owing taxes instead of getting money back. This year will most likely be the last year we actually get a refund because he just became fully self-employed (lost his job) two weeks before Christmas. But, I spent almost 20 years of my life being self-employed so I know how to do those taxes, too. I've been self-employed AND employed at the same time, so I know how to do THOSE taxes as well. (It's really not hard at all!) I'm even cheap about printing out the forms, too. LOL If the form has two pages, I'll print the first page, turn the paper over and put it back into the printer, then print out the other side on the same sheet of paper, just like the forms you can get at a library, post office or mailed from the IRS. Hey, paper costs money, too! So, it costs me nothing to do our taxes except for the paper and printer ink to print out the forms! Well, that and a couple of postage stamps to mail them in.