How and Why to Help Your Clients Save at Tax Time

As many of you may already know from helping your clients with tax preparation, the tax refund may be the largest single boost of income that your client receives in a year. This refund may help put your client on a path to financial stability and prevent potential future financial difficulties.

In preparation for the upcoming tax season, we wanted to share with you “The Volunteer Income Tax Preparer’s Toolkit,” produced by researchers at the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis. While prepared for the volunteer tax preparer, there are helpful resources in the toolkit that tax pro may be able to use when working with taxpayers on how to responsibly save or use their refund.

The toolkit explains:

This toolkit is designed to give you, the income tax preparer, a background on the whys and hows. The chapters […] show why it’s important to encourage your clients to save at tax time, and they provide evidence to show why encouragement works. The toolkit then offers guidance on how to comfortably, confidently use data, messaging, and behavioral economics techniques in encouraging your clients to save. It also offers insights from other VITA sites’ experiences in operating tax-time savings campaigns.

If you want to help prepare your clients to save their refund next tax season, please download “The Volunteer Income Tax Preparer’s Toolkit” here.