Tax tips: Top 5 reasons to hire a tax pro

5. You have more money than time.

Mary Knox Merrill/Staff/File
H&R Block services over 23 million customers in the United States during tax season, including 95,000 in the Boston area. For some people, the hours it takes to fill out tax forms isn't worth their time.

On average, taxpayers filing a 1040 form spend 22 hours, the IRS estimates. Those filing a 1040EZ spend seven hours.

On the cost side, filing can be free through the IRS's Free File program. Fees charged by a tax preparer tend to range from the low hundreds for simple returns to more than $1,000 for complex ones. Figuring out what your time is worth might be the only calculation you need to do.

5 of 5

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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