Tax worksheet?

[hajew86]

Hello all,

I'm looking for a tax worksheet in a excel format that maybe someone here uses for their personal tax to help prepare for withholding, esitmated taxes, etc...essentially a worksheet that would make it easy to help me or anyone prepare better for their taxes. I appreciate if anyone has the ability to share, I believe it would be very benefitical to the public. Thanks!

[Anonymous]

While I don't have a worksheet, it can be VERY beneficial to spend a few bucks on an Accountant and let them advise you here.

I essentially used last year's tax return as an estimate. I owed $6k because my withholding was off and was determined to not let that happen again. Not much is changing for me this year . . standard deduction . .. about the same income . . .living/working in the same states . . .etc. 

I live in NYC and work in NJ. Midway through this year, I went to last year's return and found the tax paid/owed to the IRS, New York State, New York City, and New Jersey. Then I went into my most recent paystub and saw what I had paid in via payroll deductions to that point in the year, and subtracted it from my 2016 totals. I took the difference and divided it by the # of pay periods I had left for the year. Then I set my payroll withholding to those certain $ amounts per paycheck for each of the 4 bureaus I pay taxes to.

I understand this might all be easy for me because I work in Accounting, so again it could be very feasible to find a CPA that will eventually do your taxes next year to give you an estimate now. I wholeheartedly believe that a good Accountant is one of the best ways you can spend a couple hundred bucks (or whatever) per year. They'd also be able to advise you if throwing an extra $1000 into a pretax retirement account could end up saving you even more money on taxes. These kind of things can happen if you're right on the border of different tax brackets.

[hajew86]

I gotcha and appreciate the input...I was just curious if anyone had something already created that they personally use. Ran into a situation after my wife and I got married where I messed up our withholding and we had to pay for it because of my lack of experience being married while having to pay taxes.

I'll have to end up getting a CPA soon enough because of the situation I'm going into next year (becoming a part owner in a family business). 

[Anonymous]

OH!

I've also in years past gone into TurboTax, TaxAct, or one of those programs and started a fake return I had no intention of actually filing and used it to help me estimate different scenarios