Baby Boomer Tax Preparer

April 15th is a tense time for many US income tax filers. It’s the time we all need to prepare our income tax records and file the tax return forms, mainly for the federal tax, state tax and city tax.

For wage earners, filing the federal tax return is pretty straight forward, but once you start to have additional income from other sources, or have many deductions then it’s time to seek some helps. You may also have an alternative minimum tax comes into play.

For most of us when we seek additional helps, we think of a tax accountant or a tax preparer firm like H&R Block. There are over ten thousand H&R Block offices out there throughout the country.

I have used H&R Block’s federal income tax preparation services many years ago, and the experience was not bad. Back then you need to file using manual forms; no electronic filing was available.

Being a Baby Boomer Tax Preparer in our case is being a seasonal part-time preparer. This job is usually starts from January through April 14th of each year, where most people would need tax preparation assistances.

To do this you must like to help people and do not mind working with numbers, not very complicated. We are not talking about advanced calculus here.

You deal with mostly basic mathematics (plus, minus, multiply, divide). The trick is an understanding of each year tax rules; you get this from attending the H&R Block tax class.

According to the US Department of Labor (http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos001.htm; 02-25-08), there will be more requirements for tax accountants. Although we are not talking about a CPA here, we can use the US Dept. of Labor’s data for comparison.

Some Paybacks

Accountants who are specialized in tax preparation will have a top-pay of $57,020, working full time. For our purpose working for about three and a half month part-time, we should be able to do about $1,200 per month working 10 hours per week. Schedule may vary from office to office.

For exact compensation number, you need to apply to H&R Block directly which you can do via their website.

Again, I consider this part-time job as an indirect way of getting enough down payment for your first rental unit. I don’t think you would want to do this forever. Although they do have permanent positions available from time to time.

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