This is assuming that you hired one, of course.
What was the fee? Did you go to some McPreparer, like H&R Block, or to your personal accountant? How complicated are your taxes? Do you own your own business or otherwise have a ton of deductions? Capital gains, huge bank interest, dependents over 65 who are blind?
I’m interested in what a typical fee might be.
We’re married homeowners, my income is mostly freelance, my wife’s income mostly comes from her pension. We normally require about 4 schedules/forms. We’ve used the same CPA for over a decade. Her fee was $180.
Our son is single, doesn’t own a home, has all his income from a salary and is pretty much a standard deduction-type. The only complication was that he had to file in two different states. The first accountant he talked to wanted $700. H&R Block charged him $150.
Our daughter was in about the same situation as our son, but only earned income in one state. She did her taxes herself. Cost $0.
I married one 15 years ago, so…about eight hundred thousand dollars.
Independent tax CPA, Silicon Valley: $650. No business income, no big capital gains, but I was getting stock options that were complicated to figure out and I was afraid of making a costly mistake.
I paid someone $200 in '05 because I moved from one state to another and bought/sold houses. Realized they didn’t find anything I couldn’t do myself. Last year we moved again from one state to another, bought/sold houses. This year I did them online as I usually do. Cost was $5 because of the $10 military discount.
$2600.
I have a US single-person business as well as a Czech holding company and of course my personal taxes. About 50 pages of forms. It is crazy that it is so complex… our system needs a major overhaul. Only standard deductions. I had to fill out the foreign bank account reports myself and because this year they want exact amounts instead of just declaring a range (eg 0-10, 10-100, 100-500 etc), it took me 16 hours to fill that out since every transaction needed to be pulled from 4 currencies into a common spreadsheet.
Fairly complicated tax return for my wife and I.
$350 is pretty much average every year. We started with this guy about 5 years ago as he was starting his business and I think he gives us a break as a charter customer though. But I could be wrong on that. We are pretty happy with what we pay him and the results we get from him.
I used to do them myself–but they started getting complicated about 5 years ago and now I am very happy to pay someone to do them. We had this property exchange thingy that was a major pain and he was able to figure it out and saved us a ton of money.
$45 for an old guy in a shack on the side of the road to do it. And he did a fantastic job - fairly simple case, though. Student loans with repayments, couple months of full-time employment, and then a switch to self-employment.
Waitaminute, you paid $2600 and spent 16 hours of your own time? For that much dough I’d want the accountant to do a psychic reading or divine all necessary information from the ether while I drank a cocktail and got a back massage.
$760 a CPA.
LLC with a 4 plex in it had to compute all the paperwork. Second LLC K-1 filled out by someone else. Schedule A. Dealing with a defaulted note that I hold. Calif state tax form, Nevada state tax form, and Arizona state tax form.
I also do mine to see how I am doing. And I usually make some mistake that could have gotten me into trouble.
Before I purchased any property, joined any pooled cash investments, or was involved in signing any notes I always did my own taxes.
Yes. the 16 hours was for a single form “TD F 90-22.1” to report foreign bank accounts. It used to be you had to check a box indicating how much was in the account, something like 0-9,999, 10,000-49,999, 50,000-99,999 etc. That was easy and took no time since I know generally how much is in my accounts.
Starting this year they want the exact (to the penny) highest amount on any day during the year. Well, if you have an account that has 4 different currencies and there are transactions in (and between) all of them, it is a huge PITA to figure out esp when the bank does not send paper statements and the online system only lets you look at 30 days at a time and only one currency at a time. I wrote an angry letter to the IRS Banking secrecy office (that’s where it says to send comments).
My tax guy stopped doing these forms because they are a huge nightmare now.
The $2600 was: $1,000 for my Czech holding company return, $500 for my US company (no employees really, but purchases, writeoffs, etc), $800 for my personal taxes and $300 for the US side of my Czech holding company since I own 100% of it, it has to be reported to the IRS.
I support the Fair Tax 110% http://www.fairtax.org
What Nevada state tax form?? - Nevada has no state income tax.
A local accountant who does taxes on the side. Last year he did them for free, this year 60 dollars.
Single Male, one income, no house, deduct only student loan interest and HSA contributions. TurboTax Online. $0
Mine have been done for about 10 years by my former boss who used to be an auditor with the Australian Taxation Office. I buy him a beer when he drops off my refund cheque each year.
Sixty bucks plus the bonus annual creep-out. He works out of a rundown old Victorian house with crap stacked floor to ceiling. And I don’t think he’s washed his hair even once this year.
My wife and I each paid about $150 to a real accountant at a large firm. It used to be worth it when we lived all over the place and I had a business, but now our situation is relatively simple and we still go to him just because we got out of the habit of doing our returns ourselves and can’t be bothered getting back into the habit. We should just file online ourselves for zero cost, but we won’t. There’s just too much other stuff to do.
Thanks for all the responses. It’s kind of amazing what ranges of fees people will pay.
I ask because my GF usually got her uncle to do her taxes. This year she paid someone. She was shocked to find that the bill was $500. (Divorced, receiving child support, homeowner, condo owner, business owner, perpetually poor.)
$120
Married, one kid, mortgage, student loans, current college expenses, some small medical expenses and some side-job income which wasn’t taxed throughout the year. Nothing extreme but it wasn’t a 1040EZ either.
We used to use my mother’s childhood friend who didn’t charge us anything beyond the bottle of wine my mother would bring him. But my sister started using this other guy and he’s found much more money (I guess you get what you pay for) so last year my wife & I tried him and this year even my mother switched over. So it’s $120 more but, when we’re getting an extra $1000 or something back, it’s well worth it.
$60
I acknowledge that I was being lazy and could have gone the TurboTax route for free - or is it $9? Whatever.
I decided to go w/ a [cheap] professional because if I ever get audited I want to be able to shrug and honestly say that I didn’t do it.