The One Thing We Didn’t DIY This Year

This spring marked a first for me: It was the first time I paid someone to do my taxes.

For a died-in-the-wool DIY-er who makes her own bread, bodywash, pizza sauce and salad dressing, who takes it upon herself to fix a broken window, mend her own clothes, and even try to grow her own food, well, it should be obvious that I like to be able to do things on my own.

There’s some satisfaction in being able to say “I made that” or “I did that,” to know how something works well enough to do it yourself. There’s a sense of self-reliance and independence in taking up hammer or rolling pin or trowel and go at it yourself, wearing the smudges of ensuing dirt and flour and paint like badges.

But every year when it rolls around to April 15th, I find myself stuck and stalled by one thing that I haven’t yet managed to conquer on my own: taxes. As someone who works from home, there are a myriad of tax-benefits available to me and that right there is what takes something that can be a simple fill-in-the-blank sort of scenario into one that, in our household, turns into hours spent typing in numbers, looking up definitions, rifling through receipts and piling up papers.

We’ve tried the DIY approach to doing our taxes, buying different levels of the tax software that’s out there, from the free stuff to the $100-a-pop professional edition. They all end up with the same result: utter frustration.

Last year, we even pretty much gave up on trying to take any deduction or write-off other than the standard deduction.  We knew there were lots of ways we could trim our bill down (because we did end up owing quite a bit), but we simply didn’t know what to do with it all. So, in defeat, we threw our hands up to the whole process and just stopped trying to sort it out, which only absolved some of the stress.

This year, though, we decided, kind of as a last-ditch effort to save our sanity, we hired a CPA to do our taxes. It was a woman recommended by one of my husband’s coworkers. I spent a few days ahead of time—in mid-February—preparing all our receipts and expenses and income and bills, typing them tidily into Excel spreadsheets.

We went into the meeting and within an hour had tackled what would have taken us an entire weekend spent trying not to be short with one another, trying not to get irritated with the system, trying not to hate every single second of it.

Instead, we walked out of there without any of the aggravation and a sense of relief that someone who knew what they were doing was able to walk us through the over-our-head process. For the peace of mind, I considered it a wise use of money. And, we got back a nice return, to boot, so there was nothing to complain about!

Sometimes even for the most ardent of DIY-ers, there's a time to call in the pros. For me, I have decided that tax time is the right time for us to do just that!

Tomorrow’s the last day to submit your taxes. How was the process for you?

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