Audit your 2025 tax return before you move on from tax season, because your filed return can reveal missed opportunities to lower next year’s tax bill. Most business owners think filing is the finish line, but the real opportunity starts after the return is done. Your completed return can show you what worked, what did not, and where you may have missed chances to lower your taxes next year.
Most business owners treat filing their tax return like the finish line. Once the return is submitted, they close the laptop, breathe out, and move on.
That is a mistake.
Your 2025 tax return is not the end of the process. It is one of the most useful tools you have for making better tax decisions going forward. If you know how to read it, your return can show you what worked, what did not, what strategies were underused, and where you missed opportunities to lower your tax bill.
If you want to lower your taxes next year, start by auditing the return you just filed.
Why You Should Audit Your 2025 Tax Return After Filing
Filing your tax return is not the finish line.
One of the biggest misconceptions business owners have is thinking tax filing and tax planning are the same thing. They are not.
Tax filing is compliance. It is the process of reporting your income, expenses, and other financial activity to the IRS and state agencies. It is required by law, but on its own, it does not reduce your taxes.
Tax planning is where actual savings happen. That is the work you do throughout the year to legally reduce what you owe. It includes choosing the right entity structure, implementing strategies at the right time, tracking deductions properly, and making sure those strategies are fully executed before year end.
So if your 2025 return is already filed, good. That part is done. Now the real question is this: did any of your strategy actually work?
How to Audit Your 2025 Tax Return for Missed Tax Savings
Your tax return gives you a snapshot of what happened financially over the past year.
It shows your income, deductions, credits, total tax, and business profit. It also gives you a chance to step back and ask whether your planning matched your goals. Did you owe more than expected? Did you implement the strategies you meant to use? Did those strategies actually save you money?
Most business owners never ask those questions. They focus only on whether they got a refund or had a balance due. But that is not the real measure of success. A refund does not mean your strategy worked. It may simply mean you overpaid throughout the year. The more important numbers are your adjusted gross income, your total tax, and your business profit.
Start by Reviewing the Right Numbers
Adjusted Gross Income
Start by reviewing your Form 1040 for key figures like adjusted gross income and total tax. Adjusted gross income is especially important because it affects eligibility for certain deductions, credits, and other tax benefits as your income increases.
If your adjusted gross income is climbing into higher ranges, especially several hundred thousand dollars or more, it may be time to start planning more intentionally around it.
Total Tax
Another number to pay close attention to is your total tax. This is the amount that reflects what you actually owed, regardless of whether you got a refund or wrote a check. That total tax number is a much better benchmark than the refund amount because it tells you what your real tax burden was.
If your total tax feels too high, that is your signal. Something needs to change before next year.
Business Profit or Loss
If you are a sole proprietor or single-member LLC, look at your Schedule C. If you have an S corporation, review Form 1120-S. If you operate as a partnership, review Form 1065. In each case, your return shows your business income, expenses, and profit.
This matters because you are generally taxed on profit, not revenue. A business can bring in more money and still owe less in tax if expenses were managed strategically and profit was reduced appropriately. Revenue alone does not tell you enough. Profit is the number that gives the clearer picture.
Ask What Actually Happened
Once you have reviewed the return, the next step is to define whether your strategy worked.
Start with the outcome. How much did you pay in federal tax, state tax, and self-employment tax? Did you owe more than expected? Did you pay less than expected? Were you comfortable with that number?
Then ask a more specific question: how much did your tax strategies actually save?
If you hired your kids, elected S corporation status, used the home office deduction, or implemented other common strategies, compare what your tax bill would have been without them. This helps you see which strategies were truly worthwhile and which ones may need to be adjusted.
Finally, ask whether you completed the strategies you intended to use. Many tax ideas fail not because they are bad, but because they were never fully implemented. Business owners often wait too long, get busy, or hear about a strategy too late in the year to use it effectively.
Audit the Tax Strategies You Used
This is where the real value of the exercise starts to show.
Most strategies do not fail because they are flawed. They fail because they were poorly implemented, underused, or handled without enough follow-through.
If you elected S corporation status, did you choose a reasonable salary that actually created self-employment tax savings? If your salary was set too high, the election may not have saved much at all.
If you made retirement contributions, did you contribute the right amount? Could you have contributed more, or did you tie up more cash than made sense for your business?
If you used an accountable plan, claimed home office, or deducted vehicle use, did you maximize those properly and document them correctly? If you hired your kids, did you do it in a way that made sense and reflected real work performed? If you had access to an HSA, health insurance deductions, college savings strategies, real estate deductions, or even a cost segregation opportunity, did you use those to the fullest appropriate extent?
The goal is not to pile on strategies just to say you used them. The goal is to use the right strategies well.
Find the Missed Opportunities
Once you review what you did, it becomes easier to see what you missed.
What did you learn too late to implement? What did you mean to do but never finished? What planning opportunities never made it onto the return because no one addressed them early enough in the year?
This is often where the biggest tax savings live.
A lot of business owners only start thinking seriously about taxes once they feel the pain of a large bill. That pain can be useful if you let it motivate a better plan. Instead of moving on and repeating the same mistakes, use that frustration as a reason to act earlier this year.
Compare Expected vs. Actual
Another useful part of the audit is comparing what you expected to happen against what actually happened.
Was your income where you thought it would be? Were your estimated tax payments accurate? Did your projections line up with reality, or were you consistently too high or too low?
This matters because better planning starts with better forecasting. If your income patterns tend to be predictable, use that. If you tend to overestimate or underestimate every year, that tells you something too. The more accurate your expectations are, the easier it becomes to build a tax strategy that works in real life.
Use Your Return as a Roadmap for 2026
Your 2025 return should not sit in a folder untouched until next spring. It should become the starting point for your 2026 tax plan.
Use it to map your income patterns, review your expense categories, evaluate your entity structure, and understand your likely tax bracket. Then build from there.
This is the time to decide what strategies you want to implement this year and when you are going to implement them. Build a monthly plan. Create quarterly checkpoints. Decide what needs to happen in June, what needs attention in the fall, and what year-end tasks need to be ready before December arrives.
That kind of structure makes tax planning more practical. It also makes follow-through much more likely.
Three Questions to Ask Before Next Tax Season
After reviewing your return, there are three important questions every business owner should ask.
What worked that you should double down on?
What underperformed or needs to be improved?
What needs to change before December hits again?
Those questions force you to move beyond reaction and into strategy. They help you stop treating taxes as a once-a-year scramble and start treating them as an ongoing business function.
There is also one more question worth asking: are you actually okay with the tax bill you just paid? If the answer is yes, keep doing what you are doing. If the answer is no, then now is the time to build a better plan.
The Bottom Line
Filing your taxes is not the end of the process. It is the beginning of better decisions.
Your tax return is more than a report. It is a tool. It can show you where your money went, where your planning worked, where it fell short, and what needs to happen next. Business owners who use their return this way are in a much better position to lower their taxes legally and strategically next year.
If you want a lower tax bill next year, do not wait until the end of the year to think about it. Audit your 2025 tax return now, and use what you find to build a smarter plan going forward.
Want help turning your 2025 return into a real tax strategy? That is where the real savings happen. If you want help finding missed opportunities and building a smarter plan for next year, connect with our team.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why should I audit my 2025 tax return?
Auditing your 2025 tax return helps you see what worked, what did not, and where you may have missed tax-saving opportunities for next year.
What should I review on my tax return?
Review your adjusted gross income, total tax, and business profit or loss to understand your real tax position.
Does a tax refund mean my strategy worked?
Not always. A refund may simply mean you overpaid during the year, not that you lowered your total tax bill.
When should I review my 2025 tax return?
The best time is right after filing, while the details are fresh and there is still time to improve this year’s tax strategy.
What is the difference between tax filing and tax planning?
Tax filing reports what already happened. Tax planning helps you make decisions throughout the year to legally lower your taxes.
What forms should business owners review?
Depending on your business, review Form 1040, Schedule C, Form 1120-S, or Form 1065.
Transcription
Introduction: Filing Your Taxes is Not the Finish Line
[00:00:00] You made it. Your 2025 tax return is filed or maybe extended and maybe you even took a breath or a sigh of relief. You closed the laptop. You told yourself I’ll deal with the rest next year. But here’s the real question that no one’s asking. Did any of it actually work? Because most business owners treat filing their taxes like the finish line, when in reality it’s the starting point for smarter tax strategy.
Today I’m gonna show you how to audit your own tax return strategy spot, what worked and spot what didn’t, and how we use a file tax return as a blueprint to start legally lowering your taxes even more. Next year. So let’s talk about, the first big misconception is that when I file my tax return, it’s done.
And what I always talk about when we’re talking about taxes, we talk about tax filing, and then we have talks that which is prep and filing. And then we also talk about tax planning. And they are two very different paths and very different ways we get to ’em in various different ways that we actually complete them.
Tax prep and filings. Important that’s required by law. [00:01:00] That is what we do in April. We prepare a tax return. We write in all of our information. Here’s our income, here’s our expenses, here’s all of our activity, and we file that with the state government. We file that with the federal government. We’re preparing a tax return and filing it, and that’s just taking information and it’s sending it up.
To the government. Again, important required by law, but it doesn’t save taxes. Filing a tax return has nothing to do with how much you saved in taxes or, or what you’re doing to save money on taxes. That’s where tax planning comes in. Tax planning is something that happens between January and December.
Most tax planning has to be done throughout. The year in tax planning are the things that we do, the strategies that we implement inside of our business to ensure that we’re paying the least amount in taxes as legally possible. So the big misconception is that once you file a tax return, you’re done.
That’s all you need to do. That filing is completed, but that’s not true. Filing is just that first step. Tax planning comes after that. Tax planning are the things that we do throughout the year. So we’re gonna talk about how to take your tax return and take that next step. [00:02:00] How do we take that tax return and say, how do we pay the least amount of taxes as legally possible?
Step 1: Reviewing Your Tax Return and Key Forms
Next year. And we also wanna review that and see how did it, how did we do? So step one in this whole process is, first we need to review the tax return, and I have some sample tax returns. If you have filed a tax return, take it out. Now let’s walk through these kind of line by line of different items that you want to be thinking about that you wanna be looking at.
When we talk about your tax return, and so we’re gonna talk about four different forms. The form 10 40, this is your personal tax return, the form Schedule C. So if you’re operating as a, so sole proprietorship, a single member, LLC, you’re gonna be filing your business activity on a Schedule C. Then we’re gonna talk about, uh, form 1120 s.
Those are you that have an S corporation and Form 10 65. Those are you for with a partnership. And we’re just gonna go really briefly and talk to you about what is this tax return actually showing you? What items on this tax return are important. Now, the the personal tax return, it’s not gonna tell us a ton on exact expenses and such, but there are some various different things.
If we look at adjusted gross income, that’s gonna be an important number for us. So if you have [00:03:00] your Form 10 40, your personal tax return out, you’ll notice that it starts, there’s some. Basic information, your name, your address, your dependence, all those different things. And then we get into the actual tax return and in form line one is W2.
So we start with income and we record all this different income we have, you know, whether it’s interest, whether it’s W2 income, whether it’s dividends, IRA, distributions, pensions, annuities, social security benefits. We report to the IRS, all of this type of income that we have. Then we get to a piece where we do adjustments and we do adjustments to that income.
So if you have student loan interest, those might be some adjustments that you make in that. The bottom. Of page one of your 10 40 line 11 A, you have your adjusted gross income. And this adjusted gross income is an important number because that’s taking all of your income minus uh, any adjustments that you have from it.
And that adjusted gross income is often a number that’s used for a lot of phase outs. Do you qualify for the qualified business income production? Your a GI is gonna tell that. Do your, are you gonna [00:04:00] be capped? On how much state and local income taxes you can take, that might be property taxes, state taxes, are you capped on how much of a deduction you can get as an itemized deduction for it.
Your QBI is going to, or your adjusted gross income is gonna explain that number, whether you have that or not. So the, the adjusted gross income is a very important number that we want to be tracking, especially we’re starting to get into higher numbers. Think 300, 400, $500,000 or more. We’re gonna wanna start watching that adjusted gross income because there might be strategies that we want to implement to help lower that, which is gonna give us a benefit when we come to different phase outs.
So not only were we lowering it, but we’re paying less taxes from that standpoint. There might be other phase outs that we’re phasing into now that we typically would’ve been phased out of in that benefits even further than just the tax savings. Then we go to page two of the 10 40. We have, um, the tax and credits section.
So Line 12 E is whether you take a standard deduction or itemized deduction. Standard deduction. Remember back in the 2017, the Tax Cuts and jobs act, this increased a lot. [00:05:00] So a lot of people started to take this standard deduction. But if you have high state and local taxes, you have high um, mortgage interest, you have charitable contributions, all those different things, that’s part of itemized deductions.
You then get a deduction with qualified business income, and then all the way in line 24, you’re gonna have your total tax. This is the tax number that you owe. This is what, this is, the total tax that you have due to the IRS, and this is an important number to look at. Then that next section lines 25 to 33.
It’s just reconciliation, saying, okay, here’s the total tax, here’s the payments that I made, whether that’s through W2 withholdings, whether that’s from estimated taxes. And then you come to a reconciliation, you either have an amount due or you’re getting a refund, and so many people plan their tax bill based on the amount due or refund.
That’s not necessarily true. The number we wanna be looking at is, are we saving taxes, is, let’s look at our adjusted gross income. Let’s compare that to prior, previous years as it gone up or down. And let’s look at that total tax line. That’s line 24. What does that look like? Now [00:06:00] we’re gonna look at a schedule seal.
So Schedule C is if you’re a sole proprietorship, single member lc on a Schedule C, you have your income minus your cost of goods sold, and then you have all these expenses, and then you come down to line 20, uh, 29, which is your profit or loss. This is what you wanted to annualize in your tax return. Look at your Schedule C.
This is all your business activity. What did you have for expenses? Is all your expenses wrapped into that schedule C, yes or no? Now, if we look at 1120 s, all we need to look at mainly is page one. You are gonna have on the top your income master cost of goods sold, and then you’re gonna have all these expenses listed out, and then you’re gonna have line, uh, 22, that’s gonna be your profit or loss.
Again, you are taxed on for pass through entities. You are taxed on the profit. Of your business, that’s what you get taxed on. So it’s important that we’re analyzing that profit number. Your revenue could double, but your profit could still go down. If your revenue doubled and your expenses more than doubled, guess what that profit number is going down.
So revenue is not necessarily a complete [00:07:00] indicator on how much we’re gonna pay in taxes. It all comes down to that profit amount, which is a lot of the tax planning that we do as well. And then same thing. If you’re a a Form 10 65 file, you’re in a partnership. And on top of that tax form lines one A through eight, you’re gonna have your income minus your cost of goods sold.
Then you’re gonna have all of your expenses. And then on line 23, you’re gonna have your business or profit. So the first thing you want to do is review your tax return. Look at not only your 10 40 and what your adjust gross income is and, and what your, uh, total taxes, but look at your business tax return, whether it’s a Schedule C, whether it’s 1120 s, whether it’s a Form 10 65.
Step 2: Defining Success: Did Your Strategy Work?
Look at that and look at the expenses From there, you want to ensure that the strategies you’re putting in are making their way to your business tax return. So step one, review your tax return. Step two, you wanna define, did this work? Start with an outcome. Your tax bill, what did you actually pay in federal tax?
What did you actually pay in state tax? What did you actually pay in self-employment taxes? And did you owe more than you [00:08:00] expected to? We wanna do an analysis of this. Did we pay more in taxes than we want to? Now, of course, everyone wants to pay zero in tax, and that’s, that’s a dream. That’s, that’s something we can think about.
That’s something we can adhere to, but not, that’s not always gonna be possible. And so the question is, did. We what we expected to pay in tax, is that what we paid? Do we pay more or less? Now, we are not, refund is not a status point. Whether you got a refund or not, or the size of your refund has nothing to do, how much you pay in tax.
Because guess what? Let’s say that I’m paying through W2 withholdings. I’m making payments to the federal government, the state government, and we look at the tax owed. And let’s just say I wrote a check at the end of the year for a hundred thousand dollars to the federal government, and let’s say that that was all an overpayment.
Well, I’m gonna get a refund of a hundred thousand dollars. Does that mean that I paid less in tax? No. It just means that I way overpaid. I paid that a hundred thousand dollars that I shouldn’t have. So stop looking at a refund. Or how big your refund is, or how much you owe [00:09:00] as your status point as how much you paid in tax.
Instead, look at that total tax number. How much are you paying in various taxes to the various agencies, whether it’s withholding tax, whether it is self-employment tax, what are you paying in tax and did you owe more? Than expected. The next thing we wanna look at is how much did you save If you implemented Irene, your kids, maybe an S corporation, maybe home office, maybe automobile.
If you implemented five or six strategies, what would your tax have been if you didn’t implement that? That’s some good information. No, that’s some good data points to have to say, okay, here’s how much I actually saved in taxes based on what I did. And hopefully that can lead as motivation to continue to go down that path, to continue to press forward with this idea of tax planning.
And then the final question of did it work is, did you complete the strategies that you wanted to, you know, a lot of people have this big idea. They’re gonna tax plan, they’re gonna hire their kids, they’re gonna do all these things, and then it gets to December, they don’t do it, and then all of a sudden it’s January, February, and the windows closed for a lot of those different strategies.
The question that you have [00:10:00] to ask yourself is, were you able to implement the strategies that you wanted to? Let’s get to a point of that. Let’s review our tax return and let’s, let’s analyze. Did the tax planning strategy that we put in place, did it work? Did it accomplish what we wanted to? Did we owe what we expected?
Did we, did we owe too much? Did we end up paying less in tax than we expected? That’s the good news. So did it work? Did we complete the strategies I wanted and is our tax bill at a place where we want it to find your status point there? Then we go to step three. We need to start to audit the strategies that you implemented.
Step 3: Auditing Implementation and Utilization
In most strategies when we talk about tax planning, most strategies don’t fail because they’re bad. They fail because they were poorly implemented or not implemented at all, or even underutilized. So let’s say you, you decide to do the S-corp election is the, uh, if you did the S-corp election. What was your reasonable salary?
Did your reasonable salary make sense? Do you have backup proof to back up that reasonable salary? Was the reasonable salary something that actually saved you money? Let’s say [00:11:00] you were looking at an S corporation and your profit was a hundred thousand dollars and you just. Elected scorp status and now you’re taking a hundred thousand dollars salary.
Well, guess what? You didn’t save any self-employment taxes by doing that SCORP election. So we need to reevaluate. Let’s look at retirement contributions. Could we have put more away? Did we put too much away? Is our retirement getting bigger than we actually needed to? And we could usually we could use those funds elsewhere to help grow in, strengthen our business.
Let’s start to annualize that. Let’s look at your accountable plan, your home office, your automobile. Are you taking advantage of these strategies to their fullest extent? Because I talk to a lot of people. I’d say, Mike, yes, I’m doing this strategy, or, yes, I’m doing this. But then we start to look at their tax return and they’re not doing it to the fullest extent.
They’re not taking the fullest advantage possible. Maybe we’re gonna look at maximizing deduction meals, travel technology. Are we utilizing that? Maybe the Augusta rule, did you take the Augusta rule and did you properly record that Augusta Rule on your tax return? Maybe we look at hiring your kids. Did you hire your kids in your business?
Did you hire them? To the fullest [00:12:00] extent? Did you not abuse the strategy, but did you hire your kids where it makes sense? Did you implement a board for your business? What about health items? Did you have an HSA? Did you max out your HSA? Did you take advantage of health insurance? Did you report it properly?
Did you take it the right way based on how your entity structure is set up? Did you have high medical costs? Did you implement a plan for that? These are all the different things that we need to start looking at. We might even look at college savings. Did you save for college for your kids? Is that something you want to do?
Did you do it through a 5 29 plan? Are you invested in real estate? Was that properly recorded on Schedule E of your personal tax return? And did you take the most advantage of that based on what you had? Did you do a cost sex study? Does it make sense to do a cost sex study? These are the questions from tax plan that we wanna make sense.
Again, most strategies don’t fail because they’re bad. They fail because they were poorly implemented or underutilized. And we need to do an analysis to say, okay, if we did implement a strategy. Did we do it to the extent that we can by being, by also being smart about it and not being too aggressive, but making it to a point where it’s [00:13:00] gonna produce the best tax savings with backup proof, backup details to help back that up.
Call to Action: Tax Savings Starter Kit
Now real quick, if you are a business owner and you are tired of guessing when it comes to taxes, you need our Tax Savings Starter Kit. It’s 100% free. Inside, you’ll get our ultimate list of business deductions. You’ll get real case studies showing how others have saved 5,000 to $25,000 or more, and you’ll get access to a bonus discovery call with our team.
Just head in over to tax savings podcast.com/starter kit to grab your free copy. Again, that’s tax savings podcast.com/starter kit to grab your free copy. Alright, now back to the review in step four.
Step 4: Finding Missed Moves and Opportunities
All right, so step four then is that you need to find the missed moves. So ask yourself, what could I have done if I would’ve done debt, better planning throughout the year? What did I learn too late? You know, we call this kind of the December panic, where all of a sudden you hear a strategy in December and you’re like, um, I, I need to do that strategy.
So what did you learn too late that you weren’t able to [00:14:00] implement? Or what could you have done if you would’ve had a better plan? What, what opportunities were out there? And again, remember, strategy is usually done between January. In December, but people don’t feel the pain until much later. People don’t feel the pain now until you get hit with that large tax bill.
And so we try to put this idea in you now when you’re feeling the pain, when you’re inside of this pain. Think about. What you can do from this point forward, from this point till the end of the year. Think about what you can do inside your business to make sure that next year you don’t have that pain.
Next year you paid and you can, you can get that tax bill, you can get that tax return. You can look at that total tax in your, on your, on your form 10 40 and say, that is a number that I’m proud of, that I’m good to pay, and I’m proud because it is the lowest that I could legally possibly get it what needs to be done.
How do you get there? So we want to analyze what were some of those missed moves? What were some of those opportunities that didn’t even show up on our tax return because we didn’t know about them, we didn’t implement them, whatever it might be from that standpoint. [00:15:00] Step five is to compare expected.
Versus actual, and this is just going in, was your income where you expected it to be? What about taxes? Where your taxes were they expected to be? Did you pay the right in estimated taxes? And this is a, this is a good practice to go through because some people, they pay way too much in estimated taxes.
They pay way too much and they need to, or some people think their income’s gonna be way higher, and then it always comes in lower and they expect way higher and it always comes in lower. So you wanna start to prepare yourself to say. Are my expectations typically where they need to be. Now, some people like to be super conservative.
They’re gonna pro project high income, and if they come in less great, they’re covered on taxes because they’ve expected that higher income. And that is fine to be conservative, but start to understand what some of your trends are. So when you are making estimate taxes this year, when you are planning around this year, where are you at?
You know, what, what, what standpoint are you at from that? And what is your expected versus actual return on that? And then step six is we need to use this [00:16:00] return as a ground point, as a roadmap, as a launching point for 2026. We need to map out income patterns, expense categories, entity structure, tax bracket positioning.
Step 6: Using the Return as a Roadmap for the Next Year
We want to start to think about, okay, 2025 is over. 2025 is a tax return. That is just a time and presence. What does 2026 look like and what’s gonna translate to 2026? What’s gonna change in 2026? What’s gonna stay the same in 2026 and start to run that process? Start looking at income. What’s that pattern gonna look like?
Increasing. Decreasing expenses. Increasing. Decreasing. Do we have the right entity structure? Now is a great time to review your entity structure and make sure you’re taking and making the best use of it. And what tax bracket are you gonna be in, because that can be really big, whether you’re in the 24% tax bracket or the 37% tax bracket, that’s a wide change.
And there’s different planning that we need to do in each of those buckets. So once you kinda map out, here’s where 2026 is gonna be. Based on prior year data and [00:17:00] expected changes, here’s where we expect to be. Then we start to build, we want to build a monthly tax strategy plan. We want to build a quarterly check puts checkpoint system.
We want to build a yearend execution roadmap because right now. We’re still in the early part of the year. We have plenty of time to think about what strategies we want to implement and how we’re going to implement them. So start that tax strategy plan. What strategies are you gonna implement? Poke a list of 10 to 12 strategies that you want to implement here in 2026.
And how are we gonna do it? What are you gonna do in June? What are you gonna do in July? What are you gonna wait till November to do? What? Are you gonna wait till you know October to start implementing? Get a plan, get a roadmap set up to what you’re gonna implement. And when you’re gonna implement it and then have a quarterly check in, let’s check in each quarter.
Where are we at? We said we were gonna do this in June and July. Did we do it? What’s the status of that? Have we completed it? Is there still some things we need to do? I know we say that we’re gonna do this in November. What legwork, what things can I start doing right now for this strategy? So when November comes, [00:18:00] it’s easy to plug and play and do that, and then have a re a year end execution roadmap.
Basically, here’s what we wanna get done, here’s what we want to do it, and let’s make sure we get it done. Take the time. Now. Take the time when you feel the pain of a tax bill, because guess what? If you just forget about that pain, it’s gonna go away, but it’s gonna come right back next April, and there’s gonna be a lot of missed opportunities you have there.
The return becomes not just a report, but it becomes a playbook that we’re gonna utilize to make sure next year here, this year in 2026, we pay the least amount in taxes as legally possible. Let’s go through a case study that I was doing. We were talking with two business owners, with the same amount of income.
Case Study and Final Takeaways
Owner A filed their taxes and moved on, and they paid $80,000 in taxes the next year. Owner. Number B, they reviewed the return strategically. They adjusted salary. They adjusted different timing opportunities. They adjusted deductions. They did planning. They planned out a strategy, and they paid $55,000 in the next year.
That’s a [00:19:00] $25,000 difference. Same income. Different strategy. The difference one used the return as a tool and built off of it, the other didn’t. They said, oh, this 80 thou, this 80,000 tax bill sucks, and they didn’t do anything with it. And guess what? Next year they did 80,000 tax bill because they didn’t do anything with it.
Don’t be owner number A, be owner number B, who does strategy? Who uses the return of this tool? Who takes planning seriously? Finally the three questions that you should always ask yourself after filing, number one, what worked that I should double down on, what strategies did you implement that did, gave you great results that you want to double down, triple down, quadruple down on this year?
To make sure you take full to agile Number two, what didn’t work? Or what underperformed, what strategy did you maybe implement that didn’t even work out for you? Or what strategy did you implement but you didn’t do it to the extent possible, and there’s more opportunity for savings. Question number three is what do I [00:20:00] need to change before December hits?
What do I need to do differently this year that I didn’t do last year? Those are the three questions that I want you to ask yourself and one bonus question, but let’s go through those three questions again. Number one, what worked that I should double down on? Number two, what didn’t work or what underperformed with opportunities to better enhance in?
Number three, what do I need to change before December hits again this year? And then here’s the bonus question that I have that’s going to lead. The way you do tax planning here in 2026. Bonus question is, am I okay with the tax bill I just paid last year? Am I okay with the amount in taxes that I paid in 2025?
If the answer is yes, keep doing what you’re doing. If you’re okay with that tax bill, you’re okay where you’re at. Keep doing what you’re doing. Keep going to those strategies. Keep doing that. If the answer’s no. Make that opportunity to change it. Now’s your time. We have plenty of time in the year. Now is the time to build that tax plan strategy, and I’m here to help you along that way.
So here’s the bottom line. Filing your taxes isn’t the end of the [00:21:00] process. It’s the start of better decisions. Your tax return is one of the most powerful financial documents that you have, but only if you actually use it. Only if you actually use it to push forward. If you found this helpful. Don’t forget to subscribe.
Hit that like button and share it with a business owner who’s sick of paying too much in tax. And if you want help from our team of tax professionals implementing all sorts of strategies and going along this tax planning process along with many other strategies as well, visit us at Tax Sell, that’s TAX elm.com, or click the link into the description for a free discovery call with our team.
We are helping people like you legally lower your tax bill every single day. Thanks for tuning in and I’ll see you on the next one.