A LITTLE INTRO… SORT OF

Hello, I’m Nicole and I’m going to show you how you can Reduce Your “Tax Stress” by Understanding your Own Tax Return. 

I’ve been told I have to include a paragraph about me, describing my experience and expertise but I always find it hard to do so. I tend to get off the subject because I am a talker! 

Here goes….

15  years ago my sister wanted to leave her company and start her own tax business. She knew she would need help so she asked me to join her. (The tech world had just taken a hit and I had just lost my job of 10 years) 

Go to school, get certified, work 3 months a year. Sounds great right? Well it didn’t exactly turn out to be that easy, ahh but that’s a different story.. 

We began in the spare room of my parents house with about 80 clients that were all my sisters. It was slow but my sister had a good mentor and then became mine. Eventually I was able to build clients through a layman’s way of explaining taxes and some major word of mouth. After 4-5 years I had almost too many clients than I had feasible time for. I was seeing almost 500 clients in an 80 day time period. This of course couldn’t be sustained by me so I had to scale back hours. I settled around 425 clients, although that changed with the pandemic. 

I have great clients. I feel a friendship with each of them. I understand that they are individuals who have their own circumstances and they understand that I am an individual who also has my own circumstances. I don’t like stress in any form, my body and mind don’t deal with it very well. 

When I first began it was difficult because of the stress and I was so empathetic to people who owed. I could relate. I couldn’t have paid a tax bill, I didn’t have savings like that. We made around the same money. We each have a family. 

I know how I would feel and therefore how they are feeling and I just wanted to make it better. For them and me. 

I struggled so much that I couldn’t bring myself to charge them my usual fee. I was so stressed that my health started to decline. 

That’s what prompted me to adopt a let’s have less “tax stress” formula to taxes. The answer was knowledge.  And that’s why I designed these courses. 

Over the years I saw a constant theme from my new clients: Their previous tax preparers (no names!) had been allowing them to owe from year to year. Never explaining why this was happening or what could be done about it. Consequently they all had “tax stress”.  They didn’t know what to expect. They thought they were going to owe. They thought that the IRS would arrest them or take their home. 

They were led to believe that this is the way taxes had to be. Well…

Personally I believed I could have a tax philosophy of less stress. I also believe in community. And I had a completely different mind set about doing taxes. I felt like we should be sharing any and all knowledge we had because we were all in the same boat. We all had to pay our fair share of taxes. 

I don’t work for the government. I’m just a lowly preparer of taxes. What does that mean? It means I know what your forms are and where they go on a tax return to correctly report them. 

Tax preparers don’t have special tracks to the IRS. No secret phone numbers. The IRS is still a mystery for us in many ways as well. 

Sharing everything I knew created a different tax environment. My clients became like friends, just on an annual visit. They were excited to do their taxes because they understood Enough to realize that taxes didn’t have to be stressful. 

This is important. They understood enough. 

There is no one person who knows every tax law. You really only need to understand what applies to you. 

You can only understand that by knowing what’s on your own tax return. It can be a super simple solution. When my clients owed taxes I would give them “post it’s” (the post it could fit into their wallet or purse and they could check regularly) the post it showed them exactly what to have withheld from their paychecks to avoid owing the following year. (I will be sharing this formula in Course guides 2 and 3) When my clients walked into my office they knew that they had either met those goals or they didn’t. They knew they were either going to get a refund or they were going to owe. 

Either way they already had a pretty good idea of what the final answer would be and therefore didn’t have to stress about the unknown. 

It was incredibly freeing for most of my clients. And me. 

This philosophy prompted some clients to suggest I make videos or a blog to share this knowledge and after too many years of thinking I couldn’t possibly, that’s what I decided to do. 

These guides are designed to give you some basic insight into your own taxes. Not to show you how to do them but how to understand enough about your own tax return to decrease your “tax stress”. 

The insights I provide are based on 15 years of tax preparation and are not intended as legal advice in any way. 

So grab a pen and some scratch paper and if possible a previous year tax return. Lets begin reducing your tax stress!