Finance Gym Weekly Workout - Should You Do Your Own Taxes or Hire an Accountant?

Hi, welcome to The Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money video series. My name is Stacey Powell and if you're ready to not just know better but do better with your money then you've come to the right place. 
Lately we've been talking about the grown up stuff around our money. Today's grown up stuff? Taxes... Sorry, we all have to like what's that saying? Death and taxes. We all have to do it! So today I'm going to teach you a little bit about how to choose how to get your taxes done. I get asked that question all the time.. Should I do it myself? Who should I hire? Where should I go? And for me, it's about how complicated are your finances? How complicated is your world? If you're not married, you don't have kids, you don't have a house yet, you don't have anything unusual going on then you absolutely should do your own taxes. And here's why.. Simply by doing them, by buying Turbo Tax or whatever tax software product it is out there, letting it walk you through the questions, seeing where it puts the answer and really kind of paying attention, hitting the little help button, the little question, googling things you don't understand, you're gonna learn, you're gonna get a little tiny tax class and have a more comprehensive understanding and that's good for you and then as you add complications on, have a kid, well you've learned then you're gonna be able to learn what that means. Get married, you're gonna be able to learn that. Buy a house? Maybe you're gonna be able to learn it. Then it starts to get a little complicated. Did you get stock options at work? Did you have to like sell back some stock options? Then it starts to get super complicated. Did you become a business owner? Then it really starts to get super complicated and that's the point. The point at which you kind of start going, maybe I should really seek the advice of someone who is experienced. You'll know when it's time I think. And then who do you hire when it's time? Do you go to one of the big box tax places? Maybe. Um.. Well.. Maybe but I'm often hesitant to send people there because, not always but often the people there they're well trained, they're well supervised they are often not very experienced. So I'm always hesitate to send people to a big box place. That's not to say there aren't some good ones, there are. Shockingly enough, they aren't that less expensive than a good tax accountant. I have for years sent a number of my clients to just a few people, I like to talk about Mike. I send people to Mike because when I send people to mike, theres a couple of things I know, one I trust the man personally, two I know he's going to teach people about their money. Not simply hand them a 50 page questionnaire, have one his staff people enter it into their tax software and spit a tax return back out without actually talking to you about it. I think that's what it really comes down to, is that when you're hiring somebody, you want to hire somebody who's going teach you a little bit. Somebody who has been doing this for a while and is trustworthy and is going to get your stuff done. You don't want to hire the person who just has the best tax strategies in the world. Unless you're in a unique situation there are very few best tax loopholes in the world. If you have the kind of money that can afford you that, you're not watching this video and there are very few tax strategies for you. It's simple, we earn money, we pay taxes, that's the truth of the matter and any reasonable tax account will tell you the same thing. 
Hopefully I've taught you a little bit about how to get your taxes done. If you would like to ask me some more questions, come on over to our FB group Team Do Better and you're welcome to ask questions in that forum. You can sign up for our newsletter at www.TheFinanceGym.com and subscribe to our video series below. Now go have fun doing your taxes!

How Much House Do You Really Need?

Hi. Welcome to The Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money Video Series. My name is Stacey Powell and if you’re ready to not just know better but do better with your money, then you’ve come to the right place.

Today we’re going to be talking about buying a home. I could go on for hours about buying a home but I’m going to just talk about one concept today and that is how much of a home do you really need. I think we’ve all seen what happened in the big mortgage meltdown and hopefully you’ve gone to see The Big Short. Great movie to really help you understand some of what happened. A lot of people bought houses but they didn’t really know how much of a house they were buying.

If you don’t have a good mortgage banker or good realtor really helping you walk through this, it can get really complicated. Most professionals will say you should take out a mortgage that’s somewhere between maybe 26 percent and 37 percent of your total monthly income and that that’s doable. Yeah, 26 to 37 percent is doable. But one of the things they don’t talk about is the price tag that comes along with that because if you’re taking out a mortgage that’s 26 percent and that’s including property taxes, insurance, mortgage insurance if you need it, one of the things you’re not kind of thinking about is all those seaming costs for the new roof or landscaping or putting new window coverings on. Any of us that have bought a new house know exactly what that goes like.

So all of a sudden, when you take this dollar and you thought that you were just shaving off 26 percent of it to buy a house, well, it’s actually kind of more like this. That’s all of your dollar bill every single month, of every dollar that you have left to spend. If you make that decision to buy a house where 37 percent of your monthly income goes towards your mortgage and your property taxes and your insurance, and then you have all of the other stuff you have to spend on your house, you’ve only got half of every dollar left to spend to live the rest of the way you want to live, to go on vacations, to buy healthy food, to send your kids to summer camp. All the other things to fund your retirement, to have emergency reserves.

So in the book I go into much greater detail and I encourage you this is a page – if you’re getting ready to buy a home, go invest in buying my book and read the couple of pages around this because it’s really important if you want wiggle room to live your life. You don’t want every single dollar to be cut in half. It’s really an unsustainable way to live and I encourage you to think a lot harder about how much home you can afford.

If you would like to chat with me about any of this, I would like you to come on over to our Facebook group Team Do Better group and join us. We can have conversations that only people in that group get to see. You can also sign up for our newsletter over at sign up for the newsletter and subscribe to our videos down below.