• OpticalMoose
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    5 months ago

    Anyone feel like a tax advisor would be more helpful than a financial advisor?

    Years ago, I had a financial advisor, and I wasn’t really impressed by the experience. He steered me into some investments that weren’t really appropriate (If I’m in my 30s, I don’t want bond funds or income funds, I want growth). Eventually, I got rid of him after he trailed the S&P for 2 years in a row.
    Really, investing isn’t hard. If you don’t know anything else, just invest in the S&P 500.
    Being tax efficient is the hard part. I’ve made some dumb tax moves over the years - converting my whole IRA to Roth at once instead of spreading it out over multiple years, not making a Roth contribution because selling a rental property put me over the income limit(I didn’t know about backdoor Roths at the time).
    Paying a few hundred to talk to a tax professional once a year could have probably saved me thousands. I imagine nowadays you could get similar info from an AI chatbot though.

    • yenahmik@lemmy.worldM
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      5 months ago

      I wonder if finding a good tax advisor runs into the same problem as finding a financial advisor - in order to know if they are worth the money, you have to know enough that just doing it yourself would make more sense.

      While I’ve never used one, my sibling was given very bad information by her new husband’s tax advisor when they were doing taxes last year.

      • OpticalMoose
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        5 months ago

        Oops, I should have specified - find a good tax advisor. I’d always assumed tax advisors were all pretty competent, but I guess some aren’t.

        And, to be clear, I’m not talking about a tax preparer. Where I live, pretty much anyone can take an online course and become a tax preparer. An actual tax advisor would typically be someone with a degree in accounting, at a minimum.

        It’s just frustrating because financial articles always say “consult a tax professional before making any moves” or something like that. But how many of us have our own tax professional? I don’t even know where to find one.

        I don’t mind paying the tax. That’s not the problem. I just hate all the complexity. We shouldn’t have to rely on an entire industry just to file our taxes. I remember the days of filling out a 1040-EZ by pencil and mailing it in to the IRS. Nowadays, my nephew (single, no kids) pays someone $140 to file a simple return.