How to Start Filing Tax Returns
Male: What should I do first to start filing my taxes?
Art: We have covered some of these already. Organization of your material before the year in question is obviously the first big priest. Having a copy of a prior to your tax return is also a good indicator. If you have moved, get the information from the state that you’re now living in. For example if you’ve relocated from California to Virginia, or Virginia to Texas, you wanna get whatever the local information is in front of you before you get started not half way in between. Then you have all your paperwork done, bring whatever methodology you’re gonna use. Now if you’ve used a paper pair in the past, you probably have an organizer book or some booklet that they’ve sent you where you fill in this year’s information and insert certain things into the booklet, that’s what you’re gonna return to your paper pair. If you’re doing this by yourself, and you're going on the program, one of the things I would recommend to get started is just go through the program without entering the information. Get an idea of the questions that they are going to ask you or basically, it’s not a they, it’s the computer’s gonna ask you, so I guess the better representation here, what it is gonna ask you to fill out. So then you can put your papers in order when you’re actually gonna be entering numbers and not have to stop on the screens, fumble around with papers, I don’t know what kind of screen savers, or saver programs you have. Most professionals we save things automatically every 5 minutes, so in the event that there’s a power bounce or the cat walks across the keyboard that we don’t lose whatever it is that we had going. But those are important steps in getting yourself started to do this. And then the emphasis, and I can't emphasize this enough, is just have patience, right. There are many, many folks out there who didn’t like math class. Didn’t sit in math comfortably, don’t have the capability of adding, subtracting in your head. Just have patience. Trust the machine. Use the calculator feature that’s in the program, if you have to add numbers together. Don’t do it by row in your head, if they have a list save function in the program and you’re saving or adding five or six numbers together, make your list. Use the list function, say charity A, this amount. Charity B, this amount, and that will produce a total for the tax return. But you have a record on how you got to the number on the return. So those are the important things to remember to get started.