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Those surveys are all based on totally bogus suppositions. If you look at my "normal" billing rates for 1040-A-MA it would be $205. But who has a 1040 and Sch A without a Sch B? Or a D? Who can buy a house without sufficient resources to have other accounts? What about non-schedule complications to the 1040 like educator expenses or student loans with worksheets to determine how much is allowed? Plus, it makes no mention of all the other factors that go into pricing. If, for example, that 1040-A-MA return came in early, with every bit of info needed, I would probably discount the price - possibly as much as $50. If, on the other hand, I had to send a half-dozen emails asking for the 3Q property tax, or had to hound them for the closing statements to calculate the refi points amortization, I might hit them with a "accounting time" fee on top of the $205 -- which could easily hit $100 (depending on how much of a PITA they were to deal with). Here's one for you -- picked up a family for 2012, brother to an existing client. He was charged $1075 for 2011. I would have charged $385 for the very same return. And every single client who has come to me from (insert name of favorite big box tax store) has found me to be substantially less expensive even though I think I charge very fairly if a bit skewed towards my benefit. So I believe the "averages" they report in the article to be low -- or at the very least unable to be compared to real life situations. Nonsense, all of it. If you think your prices are fair to you, you're fine. If your clients think you're too high, they'll leave. That's fine, too -- it's called feedback. A free market runs on it -- what an un-coerced buyer is willing to pay an un-coerced seller for something they need that the seller is willing to sell. Milton Friedman talked about it a lot and there are plenty of videos on YouTube of him doing so.

Sign in men's room: We aim to please. You aim too, please.

Best way to deal with the NSA is to bury them in useless and spurious data so that all their unConstitutional "collection" activities are useless. Add "sarin" or "ricin" to every text. Put "plutonium" in your sig line. When calling your spouse's cell phone to ask them to fetch a half gallon of milk on the way home, ask for milk and a set of RPG's. Have FUN with it!!

For those of you in a metal cage type room with poor wifi signal there is a solution. I used to work in such an office and we had these little gizmos called an Access Point installed inside each room on the ceiling. It is a little box with two small antenna sticking out. That gizmo is connected to the router. The signal strength was excellent. May be Catherine can ask her husband what those gizmos are officially called and what they cost?

Thanks for the replies. Got the return done Wednesday. It was like eating pudding with a fork: not impossible but a total pain in the @$$. Glad it's done, because they were very anxious about what they were gonna owe, and I figured I might as well do it right now rather than do it sorta right now AND later. I love these people. I had to deal with the sale of about 20 assets, and the wife wanted a reduced rate for the tax return since they were only in business six months. (Uh, nooooo.) They only paid the realtor $32,000.

The instructions can only be passed along verbally, unless you have the decryption key for the secret version. But here's a picture you can use to fashion one that works pretty well. Also, here are a couple of my friends wearing variations on the basic design. I don't have any data on how effective these versions are:

JohnH, please send a photo of the hat and construction instructions, if you would. I think it might be useful for many of us and deter NSA from prying, too.

I think it's because the microwave is made in China. When it runs it sucks all the data out of my computer through the router, beaming it to the Chinese military. Yesterday they learned I have exactly $2.36 in my checking account and my house payment is due next week. But I have a simple solution. I've fashioned an aluminum foil three-corner hat that I wear to disperse the transmissions & connect a 6-ft long ground strap between my wrist and the water pipes while typing. This ground fault interrupts the process and causes their Beijing server to crash. See? It's working right now, because you can read this but the ChiComs don't have a clue what I'm up to. It works - trust me.

Being married to an electrical engineer whose specialty is microwave-band communications, we bandy all kinds of odd words about, with disgusting regularity, in this house. Faraday cage. Gigahertz range. 50db. Ground plane (not a plane on the tarmac). Impedance. Lossy. Non-ideal. Non-linear. RF. Plus lots more. We have a wireless network that works within the confines of the office, roughly. The house was built in 1952/53, during civil defense days. The walls are 3/8" rock lath, covered by 3/8" of a very sandy, brownish cement, covered by 1/4" hard plaster. Ceilings (basement and first floor) have expanded metal lath. The whole house is basically a set of interconnected Faraday cages. To download books to my Kindle, I cannot be farther away than the dining room. My daughter's laptop regularly loses its connection from the living room. All the business hardware (and much of the non-business hardware) is hard-wired to the network -- and will stay that way! I've worked in plenty of office buildings with fewer pieces of equipment and simpler network configurations than what we have here... Yes, you do have to be aware of the frequency bands of the various other bits and pieces around your wireless network. You need to be aware of metal studs in office building walls, expanded metal lath, and more. Plus with a wireless network you also have to have security protocols. It's best to have the network locked down so that only equipment with approved MAC addresses can even see the network. Anyone coming here with a wifi laptop can see several of the neighbors' networks (only *some* of which are secured) -- but even sitting right next to the hub, cannot see ours.

Giving your spouse a signal and have her/him ring the doorbell works too!!! I just had an epiphany!! My doorbell is wireless. I get another button and mount it under my desk!! No need for spouse to ring the bell!!!