**The links in this post are referral links, which means if you click them, I get a small financial reward at no cost to you.**

So for many years, I sang the praises of TurboTax. During the pandemic, they even sent me a fairly crazy thank you box with a blanket, water bottle and candle for all the years of positive feedback I gave them.

And then that year they made my taxes an abject nightmare.

Now, many moons ago, I worked for the circus and had roughly 30+ states of tax returns to do, which wildly overwhelmed me and brought me to a physical H&R Block office to beg for help…

…and they had no idea what to do with it either.

So that was the year I learned a lot about how to file my own taxes, while hating every second of it.

The year that TurboTax messed up my taxes so thoroughly, I decided to give H&R Block another go.

And since then, I have been a loyal customer. As long as I don’t have tons of states of tax returns to do, they are actually fine and way better than TurboTax.

There are also lots of free file options that might be available to you, especially if you are low income, but we are talking about my tax journey this year.

And H&R Block has done a good and affordable enough job to get me through my current self-employed, some W-2, HSA, self-employed 401k filing tax needs.

I do most of the heavy lifting for my taxes bit-by-bit over the year with an Excel sheet and a coupon organizer to keep my receipts sorted. I keep them all organized by category in the Excel sheet, so it’s easy to just pop in the totals and digital receipts are stored in a Gmail folder and physical receipts are kept in a coupon organizer. Then at the end of each year, once my taxes are done, any physical papers are wrapped around the coupon organizer and a Post-It note with the year is slapped on it and it all goes in a filing drawer.

With the H&R Block software, it’s very easy to answer all the questions they ask me about self-employed deductions this way.

If you’re an arts worker, with more complicated returns, an excellent tax preparer, who is also a performer, is Farrell Parker of Artist Tax Prep (not an affiliate link, just a lovely person and great tax preparer).