Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background.

What will my taxes be as self employed?
Whether you're self-employed or not, knowing exactly how much tax you will pay is not always an easy task.  Various actions you can take (e.g., charitable donations, IRA contributions, selling stocks) may increase or reduce your tax liability. One tool I've found useful for estimating federal taxes is the Excel 1040 spreadsheet.  This is a spreadsheet version of the income tax return form.  It is not official and is not created by the IRS, but is maintained as a labor of love by a private individual.  In practice, however, it is pretty much an accurate implementation of the tax calculation algorithms encoded in the tax forms and instructions. The nice thing about it is that it's a spreadsheet.  You can plug numbers into various slots in the spreadsheet and see how they affect your federal tax liability.  (You may also owe state taxes depending on what state you live in.)  Of course, the estimates you get by doing this are only (at most) as accurate as your estimates of the various numbers you plug in.  Still, I think it's a free and useful way to get a ballpark estimate of your tax liability based on numbers that you can more easily estimate (e.g., how much money you expect to earn).