Tl;DR: Use these people, they're awesome…read more
In the beginning, there was a W2 for 5,000 hard earned dollars bagging groceries, my father's laughter at my ineptitude at making any money, and the beloved annual date with a nice young thing called the 1040EZ. Things were simple. I was broke. She knew I was broke. I knew she knew I was broke, but it didn't matter. She hung by.
Along came better jobs. With those jobs? I got introduced through a friend to the standard 1040. While I'll spare you the cold hearted breakup story of the previous tax form, I'll just say things were still good. I had very few write offs. I still rented. I paid a few capital gains here and there, but I bought and held all 4 of my shares in homegrocer.com...that is until they and their freshly delivered vegetables rotted on NASDAQ. TurboTax to the rescue! Just answer a lot of questions (Still not blind or dead, although for the write deduction I just might be....)....and WHAMO, back to life.
It wasn't simple, but it worked.
Sine then however, things have gotten...complicated. That damned hussy of a tax form knows I've got some cash to throw around. A rental. A refinance. an actual spouse. Heck, we just had a kid. daycare write offs, mileage expenses. tools. stock losses. stock gains. Time. This all takes a lot of time. On top of that, the more things I had to calculate, the more turbo tax wanted to charge me. State forms. write off forms. Accountant review...I'm getting a headache just writing this. I didn't have a clue if I was actually doing things correctly, as can be evidenced by my expected letter right around June informing me I still owed the government cash.
After discussing it for a few days, I asked around and found this wonderful accountant. She Listened to me miss-name virtually everything I said I had. She giggled, told me to provide a host of documents, and off we went.
That was 4 years ago. We don't even live in Corvallis anymore, but we'll be damned if we go anywhere else. We use dropbox, e-mail, a couple of phone calls, and do just about everything over the phone. This company knows how to treat a customer, work around our busy schedules, and keeps my relationship with our tax forms from ruining our impacting our relationships with each other every year. No, she's not the least expensive person out there, but in this case, you really do get what you pay for.
Go here, you won't regret it.
