Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:$3500. Ours are a little complicated.
What is a 'little complicated' mean?
I'd like to know what makes taxes harder/longer to do for CPA?
I feel like my CPA just taks on an extra 20-30% YOY when he sees our salary went up. I don't get it.
K-1s, foreign income, bunch of attachments. Our filing is usually about 3 inches thick with the bulk of it hand prepared attachments.
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:PPs earning 250k+ you are lucky (probably white). But not very sharp. You are collecting all the paperwork, spending time on answering questions, having some contact, then posting here because you can’t afford an extra few hundred bucks on a $650k salary. My 12 yr old can do our taxes. $350k, many many stock transactions, K1s, 529, charity, IRA. Turbo tax is meant for people with a high school level understanding of the English language. Tsk.
Good for you- you earn a gold star.
Now get off this thread unless you have something helpful to share based on the question asked about CPA rates.
Feel free to also start your own thread about Turbo Tax and its benefits.
Anonymous wrote:PPs earning 250k+ you are lucky (probably white). But not very sharp. You are collecting all the paperwork, spending time on answering questions, having some contact, then posting here because you can’t afford an extra few hundred bucks on a $650k salary. My 12 yr old can do our taxes. $350k, many many stock transactions, K1s, 529, charity, IRA. Turbo tax is meant for people with a high school level understanding of the English language. Tsk.
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:We just paid 1300. I used to pay $700.
I'd like a benchmark to know if this is typical.
Here are the specifics in terms of complexity for taxes
Gross salary 650k
Roughly 70k in deductions
Some mutual fund dividends (not a lot- not complicated)
Some stock (not a lot- not complicated)
IRAs and dependent care taxes
Is this normal or out of whack?
You can do that with TurboTax.
$80 at most.
This is OP- I realize it would be very cheap to do myself. However, don't have the time or patience to do turbo tax type solution. I also don't trust myself to be able to quality check the results of a software program. I am willing to pay somebody or the convenience of not doing myself (and so they can be accountable for the final result), but I want to pay a reasonable rate. So Turbo Tax is not an option...Really just hoping to know whether my CPA is charging me fairly or just looking at my income and determining a rate that is some % of my income.
Isn't it *more* time consuming to meet with an accountant?
How can you not trust yourself to check software output but do trust yourself to check accountant output?
We don't meet with the accountant. we put all our paperwork in a file and drop it off. We answer a simple questionnaire. It's all done by email. No phone conversations. We don't 'check' the output. i mean we look it over to make sure things we know about show up in line items (i.e. IRA, child care etc). And if the payment is significant we'll do a more thorough look at line items. But its not like I am spending hours checking the thick packet that comes back and recalculating each line myself. As a professional I trust that the CPA has done their job...I'm not even sure what I would look for.
Then why would you check the tax software?
Anonymous wrote:We just paid 1300. I used to pay $700.
I'd like a benchmark to know if this is typical.
Here are the specifics in terms of complexity for taxes
Gross salary 650k
Roughly 70k in deductions
Some mutual fund dividends (not a lot- not complicated)
Some stock (not a lot- not complicated)
IRAs and dependent care taxes
Is this normal or out of whack?