Do Not Prepare Your Own Personal Tax Return

Canada’s income tax system is complicated. We get a bunch of T slips, T4, T5, T3 and the scary T5013. These slips have boxes on them that contain numbers or are sometimes blank. Your job is to take all of the numbers in all of the boxes and add them up to put on your personal income tax return. Now some of us really enjoy that type of work. I personally enjoy preparing tax returns for my clients, taking a pile of paper and turning it into a tax return. I like seeing how their year went.

However, I hear from people all of the time that they do not enjoy doing their own tax returns, that it takes them a long time and they are not sure that they have done the return correctly. So here is my question, how much time do you think you should spend learning how to do something that you are only going to do once a year? Maybe if tax returns are not fun for you, you should get someone else to do them.

I would also bet that you reduce the amount of stress in your life when you get a tax professional to do your return, as there is a much better chance that your tax return is going to be prepared correctly which means that CRA does not have to contact you. Less contact with CRA generally being desirable!

This is your life. If you don’t like doing something and you are not good at it, then find someone else to do it for you.

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Painless Financial Training Group Inc. with Debi Peverill

Understand Financial Stuff, Painlessly