5 Simple Tax Tips for Individuals and Small Businesses - Avoid Stress While Saving Time and Money!

Essential tax advice for avoiding common filing problems, plus easy IRS tax relief tips for stress-free tax preparation and insider insight for saving time and money while avoiding potential IRS problems.

1. Be Careful and Thorough. Avoid common problems like illegible hand writing, mathematical errors, transposition of numbers, and missing signature. These little oversights can end up costing you time and money if you are slapped with penalties.

2. Get Organized. Allow enough time to get your "stuff" in order. For example, properly categorizing your expenditures now will save you a lot of time later. Come tax help time, you will be glad you grouped your expenditures by category (match it with verbiage on Schedule C if self-employed) and not by month or name of vendor payee.

3. Be Flexible. Timing your cash flow can save you money. In other words, always accelerate deductions in the year you are doing taxes for and always defer income, if you can, into the next year, thereby lowering your current year's tax bite. If you fall into the Alternative Minimum Tax, you may want a professional tax attorney and tax expert team to advise you.

4. Know When To Ask for Help. Tax preparation tools like TurboTax and TaxCut are great, but people with anything more than a straight W-2 (including anyone with even the smallest business "Schedule C") should be aware of the limitations of these software programs.

Also, if you can't afford to pay your IRS back taxes, send in a $10 check with your tax returns on April 15th. This makes it possible for you to file on time, which reduces IRS penalties and demonstrates good faith to pay. Then you can go work with an IRS tax attorney or Certified Tax Resolution Specialist to help you negotiate a discounted settlement for tax relief if you qualify.

5. Don't be Penny Wise and Pound Foolish. Hiring an expert CPA or EA to prepare your return is a small annual investment that can pay off big! Don't do your taxes yourself unless you are a straight W-2 wage earner that takes the Standard Deductions (in other words, someone who doesn't itemize or have any unreimbursed employee business expenses).

For more information on achieving a tax resolution for your IRS problems, visit www.taxresolution.com for a free tax relief consultation or call 866-IRS-PROBLEMS.

Michael Rozbruch, one of the nation's leading tax experts, is a Certified Tax Resolution Specialist (CTRS), licensed CPA in the state of Maryland and the founder of Tax Resolution Services (http://www.taxresolution.com/). He teams up with an expert staff of tax attorneys, CPAs, and tax relief professionals to help individuals and small businesses solve their IRS problems with tax liens, unfiled back taxes, offers in compromise, wage levies, tax relief, delinquent returns, tax debt installment plans, bankruptcy and protecting an innocent spouse from unfair tax burdens.