Introduction

Welcome to Part I of the DaGray Income Tax Management Course.

Part I is designed to teach individuals to prepare and understand their own annual income tax forms.

Confuscious said, "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.  Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. 

This course will teach you "how to fish."            

Believe it or not, the understanding and mastery of one’s income tax preparation can be the gateway to better management of one’s financial planning for future goals (college expenses, retirement, health care expenses, unseen emergencies), as well as one’s on-going budgets for daily living. 

This course will teach you the rules of the game that is the income tax preparation process.  They are not as hard as they are made out to be; nor as intimidating as many people feel about them.

And more, it will teach you the basics of the income taxation concept.  With this framework of basic understanding, the whole game becomes much easier to learn and master.

Simply stated, your goal is to minimize the amount of your income that the federal government taxes.

Think about it:  you are in a game with the government to determine how much of your income it is going to take from you.  Therefore, your goal in this game is to minimize that amount. 

The playing field is the IRS Form 1040.

The rulebook for the game is taken from the Internal Revenue Code.  Not the entire 44,000 pages of the IRC, but the 100 or so pages in the 1040 Instructions booklet that is published each year.

Dont worry.  You don't have to learn all 100 pages of the rulebook.  You just have to know how to use it as a reference book, just as you don't have to learn all the pages of, say, a dictionary.  But you do have to know how to use it as a reference book.

So, in this course you will learn the playing field--the IRS Form 1040-- and you will learn the rules--the 1040 Instructions booklet 

And since you now know the goal of the game, you will be prepared to start playing the game of preparing and understanding your income tax preparation. And you will be playing to win: to minimize the amount of your tax obligation.

Have fun.  Keep telling yourself that you can do this.  Because you can.  You just have to want to do it.



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