Strategic planning throughout the year results in a minimal tax balance. The objective of planning your tax payables is not to prevent paying taxes, it is to pay no more than your fair share of taxes, and keep your money where it earns you the most.

If you aren’t aware of it yet, Uncle Sam pays no interest. If he deducts your tax payment monthly or quarterly, and takes more than his fair share, he doesn’t give you anything back for the privilege of using your hard earned money. By the same token, if you don’t pay in enough, he charges you a penalty and interest.

As a W-2 wage earner, if you are over paying your tax debt, you may be considering it a ‘forced savings plan’, but you gain nothing, using that particular plan. By putting the same amount in savings every year, earning interest on the balance, and continuing to regularly invest in your savings fund, you may be able to utilize the retirement savings plan reducing your tax debt significantly. With the advice of a competent tax consultant, your savings can become an investment with a tax reduction at the end of the year.

As a business owner paying tax quarterly, over paying your taxes can cost you considerably more. Your tax debt may actually be borrowed money, on a line of credit from the bank where you pay interest for the use of the money. If tax planning were part of your business expenses, you get to deduct the amount paid to the tax consultant from your business, you don’t have to pay interest on more than you need to pay in (if using a line of credit to pay taxes), and any saved money can be placed in a retirement fund or savings plan to draw interest for you. Once again, a tax consultant can save you money.

These are just a couple of ways you can save money by hiring a tax consultant. So, who is your Tax Deity? Your tax consultant or Uncle Sam?

Copyright © 2005 - Jan Verhoeff

Tax planning is an important part of setting up your business, working your job, or living in a world where taxes are a fact of life. Consider saving money on your taxes this year, by planning well, and paying yourself first. Visit eBiz Brand Performance for more information.

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If you ask a volunteer to help you prepare your tax return, you are risking errors in your return.

According to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, volunteers run a 6 in 10 chance of errors, only a slight improvement over last year.

The Inspector General asked volunteers to prepare tax returns for two hypothetical taxpayers. Only 39% of this year’s returns were prepared correctly. Last year, 34% were correct.

The IRS has been encouraging taxpayers to seek tax filing assistance at volunteer centers, instead of from the IRS. The centers have been developed to assist low- to moderate-income, elderly and disabled filers. They also assist taxpayers with limited English. The IRS provides training and support to volunteer centers that are run by community based organizations.

The first scenario that the volunteers faced was a divorced taxpayer with a 10-year old child. The taxpayer worked as a store clerk and received child support. The second scenario was a single taxpayer who lived with her sister and only had her three children during the summer months.

In most cases, the errors were in the taxpayers’ favor. In general, the taxpayers would have gotten $31,828 as a group more than they should have.

There were a few cases where the taxpayers lost out. Those taxpayers paid out $4,411 more in taxes than was necessary.

The auditors noted that volunteers did not always use their interview sheets to get the basic taxpayer information from the taxpayer before they prepared the return. In some cases, taxpayers left many answers blank.

Martin Lukac represents http://www.RateEmpire.com and http://www.1AmericanFinancial.com, a finance web-company specializing in real estate and mortgage rates. We specialize in daily updates, mortgage news, rate predictions, mortgage rates and more. Find low home loan mortgage interest rates from hundreds of mortgage companies!

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The medium is the message, it’s sometimes said. Think of Franklin D Roosevelt and his “fireside chats” to the nation. In a pre-TV era, the radio was the perfect medium to “have a conversation with the American people”. He could get his reassuring message right into folks’ homes, and become a part of the family. A different medium, for example a grandstanding speech, wouldn’t have got the message across as effectively as an intimate radio chat. The medium most surely was the message.

But let’s come back to the 21st.century and something close to all our hearts: tax preparation, or, to be exact, tax preparation software. Unfortunately, this particular medium seems to be giving out mixed messages, although software programmers and vendors would reassure us that we can complete tax programs quickly and accurately, click “print” and produce a tax return destined to meet the IRS’s requirements.

Seems clear enough, so why the mixed messages? One of the main criticisms levelled at tax preparation software is its “one-size-fits-all” approach. Its critics, businessmen in the main, ask how it’s possible to condense an extraordinary number of codes and regulations into a half-hour interview process. Irrespective of the claims made by software programmers, critics point out that only the most general set of credits and deductions can be incorporated into tax software, which means that you’ll be the loser. It’s these sins of omission, or the questions they don’t ask, which work to your detriment and the advantage of the IRS.

Imagine this scene for a moment. A medium is holding a s

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