Back in the 1960s, my father used to make a fair bit of money during tax season for doing people's taxes. He charged, if I remember correctly, $6-$8 and more if they had a complicated form. He was a CPA and a lawyer, so this tax work was just a sideline. Some people came to our house. He rented a restaurant booth or a corner in a pharmacy and many people had their taxes done there. He also made house calls. These often involved a number of people getting their taxes done and turned into something of a social event with coffee and pastries. He had one of those great looking Olivetti adding machines. If you liked the original Prisoner series, check out the system control unit in the surveillance dome. He carried it around in a bowling ball bag. It weighed roughly what a bowling ball weighed, so lesser carrying bags couldn't handle it.
If nothing else, I learned a lot about the ways people made their living from this. There were Ukrainian nurses, authors, engineers, Irish cops, civil servants, architects, chemists, doctors, clerks and a host of others. His fee, adjusted for inflation would be around $60 or $80 today. H&R Block's base fee is $85, so this has tracked inflation. Of course, his customers could have just picked up the forms at a post office, bank or IRS office and filled them out by themselves, but people liked having a reassuring professional handling the mechanics. It's not like everyone had a calculator in their pocket back then, so having someone who could do the math was worth something. There's less of an excuse nowadays, especially now that most, if not all, of the relevant data has already been reported to the IRS.
Ok this makes sense
Back in the 1960s, my father used to make a fair bit of money during tax season for doing people's taxes. He charged, if I remember correctly, $6-$8 and more if they had a complicated form. He was a CPA and a lawyer, so this tax work was just a sideline. Some people came to our house. He rented a restaurant booth or a corner in a pharmacy and many people had their taxes done there. He also made house calls. These often involved a number of people getting their taxes done and turned into something of a social event with coffee and pastries. He had one of those great looking Olivetti adding machines. If you liked the original Prisoner series, check out the system control unit in the surveillance dome. He carried it around in a bowling ball bag. It weighed roughly what a bowling ball weighed, so lesser carrying bags couldn't handle it.
If nothing else, I learned a lot about the ways people made their living from this. There were Ukrainian nurses, authors, engineers, Irish cops, civil servants, architects, chemists, doctors, clerks and a host of others. His fee, adjusted for inflation would be around $60 or $80 today. H&R Block's base fee is $85, so this has tracked inflation. Of course, his customers could have just picked up the forms at a post office, bank or IRS office and filled them out by themselves, but people liked having a reassuring professional handling the mechanics. It's not like everyone had a calculator in their pocket back then, so having someone who could do the math was worth something. There's less of an excuse nowadays, especially now that most, if not all, of the relevant data has already been reported to the IRS.