A friend of mine says his CPA helps him pay almost 0 taxes - sounds shifty to me, but he says he doesn't itemize or anything and that it's not unethical. He claims that by strategizing with timing of paying taxes/withdrawing investments he saves tons of money. Neither of us have kids, he doesn't have MAJOR investments (definitely <100k non-retirement), he doesn't have a house, he's an employee as is his wife (no crazy deductions).
I understand concepts like putting off taxes to next year when possible and putting money in my HSA and 401k to lower my highest marginal tax rate (besides the obvious reasons). I know how to backdoor roth, and I understand why sometimes I might want to put money in a Roth rather than a traditional.
Am I really missing out by not hiring a CPA for tax planning? I'm worried I'm arrogant for wanting to do this stuff myself and am screwing my family over. I use turbotax, don't itemize, dont have kids, we DO own a house, and do have tons of student loans. We are trying to pay off as much student loans as we can every year, and max out any pre-tax contributions we can. I just don't see how our taxes could be so complicated that more planning than I can do would really save us that much money, and I doubt CPAs would catch anything that Turbotax doesn't. My friend is totally convinced that we would save a bunch, though he doesn't remember off-hand what kinds of things their CPA advises. Could anyone give examples of how their CPA helped them make a decision that saved them a ton OR help me understand specifics of tax planning (links to articles or checklists also welcome) with a fairly simple setup like ours:
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1 401k - maxing it out, my wife will be eligible for hers next August, but can't enroll til January and we will max hers out as well
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2 IRAs, but too much income to deduct traditional IRA contributions anymore - we are prioritizing paying off student loans over doing backdoor roths
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no kids but planning on it
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lots of student loan debt
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1 house (EDIT: With 30 -year, fairly low interest - 4.6% mortgage)
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I have an HSA I try to max out, my wife pays for a low deductible plan
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maybe 20k in non-retirement cash (e-fund, random inherited stocks, vacation savings)
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don't itemize (it would have started to be worth it on our 2018 taxes, but probably not now with higher standard deduction)
Thanks for any advice!
Submitted March 08, 2018 at 07:43AM by autumnotter http://ift.tt/2oYzqtO
