Some people make money far too easily. Tim and I have a big problem giving mega bucks to certain professionals simply because their industry has closed down the ability for you to do-it-yourself. How can it possibly cost a lawyer that much to photocopy a document, change a few names and dates and send it back to you?… Previously, you just didn’t ask those questions because there was absolutely nothing you could do about it.

Now you can. 

Easy ways to save legal and accounting fees:

Filing your annual return 

We received an email from our accountant the other day, offering to file our annual return for $139. This immediately rang alarm bells because $139 worth of accountant time is like 10 minutes – which means this task must be so mind numbingly simple I could do it myself. Well, what do you know, I did a quick google search and 20 minutes later, I had successfully filed our return FOR FREE at the companies office online.

Setting up a trust 

Tim and I had to set up trusts recently and were looking at a multi-thousand dollar lawyers bill until Tim found Trusts Online (only available to New Zealanders), who cut that tear jerking number to a few hundred dollars each (still fairly painful but bearable…) It’s a simple process, you enter a few details, print out a document, sign it and bam! You are now a trustee!

Keeping your accounts up to date 

So far, we’ve managed a mad dash at the end of each period to get a full set of accounts to the accountant to neaten up. This has always saved us money but been a MASSIVE hassle.

Now I update our accounts monthly. It’s not hard, it helps you budget and understand where your business is at, it helps you sleep at night ;) And at the end of each financial year, click a few buttons and export a nice set of accounts for your accountant to do only those added extras that deserve their immense fees. 

Is the Milk Running Dry? 

like any profession, a lot of a lawyers time is spent simply doing monkey workI often stumble on template documents for more and more legal matters on the internet. One thing this teaches you is that like any profession, a lot of a lawyers time is spent simply doing monkey work, however, in the past, this monkey work has been exceptionally well paid. With the opening up of communication, it appears more and more of this mundane stuff will become freely available to download and take along for your lawyers/accountant to do only the added extras that deserve their price tag.

These days, it pays to check your options :)