AE Tax Advisors

As a freelance graphic designer, I trusted my old tax preparer to handle things correctly. She charged me $150 a year and I assumed that was a fair deal. It was not. AE Tax Advisors found over $31,000 in recoverable taxes from the last three years.

The errors were staggering. My preparer was not deducting my home office -- a dedicated room where I do all my design work. She said it would "trigger an audit." She was not deducting my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, my Figma license, my iMac Pro, my drawing tablet, my monitor, my ergonomic chair, or any of my professional development courses. She also had me filing single when I should have been filing head of household, which put me in a higher bracket.

AE Tax went through three years of returns line by line. They identified every missed deduction, corrected my filing status, and amended all three years. The refund checks totaled $31,000. I was stunned.

Now AE Tax handles my taxes proactively. They set up a quarterly system where I track expenses throughout the year so nothing gets missed at filing time. They also restructured my freelance business as an S-Corp, which saves me additional money on self-employment taxes going forward.

The difference between a $150 tax preparer and a real tax advisory team is not the price -- it is the $31,000 I lost by going cheap. If you are a freelancer relying on a discount preparer, get a review from AE Tax Advisors. You may be leaving a lot of money on the table without knowing it.

I will never go back to a discount preparer again.