Tax Advisor Sought for Education Related Advice

[tenshikurai9]

I posted the following in davis_square and b0st0n. Anyone here reading this should know I live in the Boston metro-area and my local transit system is the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority or T), which connects in some places to smaller Regional Transit Authorities (RTAs) that services areas outside of the scope of the T.

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So I'm currently in a situation where I might be able to make the finances fall-in place and go to school at Landmark College in VT this Fall. Since they specialize in students with learning disablities, their web site says you can sometimes get a medical deduction as a special education expense and to consult your tax advisor.

I don't have a tax advisor.

So since I have no freaking clue as to how to even start the search process, I'm asking all you snarkers at home for advice. If you have specific advisors for me to check-out, you need to know I don't drive. If someone's particularly kick-ass, I will take the extra time to commuter rail and Regional Transit Authority out to someone.

Especially since the advisor's advice might help me avoid this from being a true statement: College: the fling that lasts 2, 4, 5 years, but costs you a lifetime.

http://www.landmark.edu/admissions/tuition-and-financial-aid/making-landmark-affordable/

ETA Landmark link.

Comments

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

Do you actually expect to have substantial income and pay taxes while you're going to school?

Hopefully a decent tax advisor would just tell you when you walked in if your situation didn't call for paying someone for advice, but just in case (apologies if this is too elementary, but this is in the set of stuff the world likes to just assume you know, and a lot of people actually don't):

1. Tax deductions aren't money back from the IRS: that's tax *credits*. Tax deductions reduce the amount of your income that the IRS considers taxable, which may ultimately have the net result of giving you money back because you have overpaid taxes over the course of the year; but no matter how much you deduct, the most you will get back this way is all the state and Federal taxes you've paid.

2. Financial aid isn't income, so if you're not earning at least $15-20k from a job or investments in the same year as going to school, deductions aren't worth it.

3. There's a standard deduction of $5800 for single people under 65. Specific ("itemized") expenses you deduct are not *added* to this, but rather replace it; so if you have $6500 in medical expenses, that's only an extra $700 in deductions, which will amount to maybe $150 in refunds. $150 is nice to have, but doesn't help much with that $6500 expense you had to incur in the first place.

4. There *are* tax *credits* for tuition, which have nothing to do with medical deductions and are good for maybe $2000. The tax form has a special box for them and the instructions tell you whether you can get them or not. Just hang on to your tuition and financial aid documents.

And in general, since you're a reasonably literate and self-sufficient human being, I'd recommend just reading Form 1040, the instructions, and the other documents it sends you off to (like Schedule A and the various other forms for deductions). Normal people who don't read find this intimidating, but it's really quite straightforward. I paid for TurboTax this year and it ended up being just as much trouble as doing it myself, plus maybe $150 in fees. Even making 30x more than I did as a student, it sucks.

[tenshikurai9.livejournal.com]

". . .this is in the set of stuff the world likes to just assume you know, and a lot of people actually don't):"

Would be nice if they actually taught stuff like this in school and Job Corps. So instead LJ is more useful.