 April 15th may seem like a long time away, but spring will be here before you know it, and it's never too early to review your tax situation. Last week the Portland Public Library held a financial literacy workshop, an IRS tax counselor, Tess Armstrong, talked about ways you can manage your taxes better. Tess, tax season is about six months off, but it's sort of around the corner as well. What should people be thinking about right now? Well, we'd like people to, number one, think about filing their income tax return, and we want them to know about the opportunities to do that for free. If they've earned less than $50,000 per year, we'd like them to know about our CASH program and AARP tax aid volunteer programs where people can get assistance with free e-filing of their federal and state tax returns. Also, we'd like them to start looking at their withholding to make sure that they have withheld enough money from their paychecks so that they don't have a balance due by April 15th of 2013. People tend to sort of do their taxes and then don't think about things like withholding and that sort of thing. What sort of changes in a person's circumstances should they trigger their thinking about withholding at other items? Changing the marital status is one of the triggers that people should consider. Also, if they have children born during the year, they may adjust their withholding. And another thing, if they are divorced out of a marriage situation and they go back to single, they need to consider the tax ramifications from changing their filing status. What about changes in employment or income levels? That's a good point. Thank you for bringing that up. We'd like to especially reach out to people who work more than one job. People with more than one part-time job are especially susceptible to under withholding on their W-2s or their weekly paychecks. What are some misconceptions that people have about dealing with the IRS? Well, I guess a lot of people are very fearful of the IRS. And we work in partnership with many non-profits and profitable corporations throughout the country to bring free volunteer income tax assistance to help people to work through the process. Filing a tax return can be a very intimidating endeavor, and we want to put as much assistance out there as possible. We use our partners' trusted intermediaries in the community that people feel comfortable talking to about their tax situations. Steve Stromsky is branch manager for Key Bank in Portland. Steve, people think of a tax refund as found money, but how really should they look at it? Well, they should look at it as a real opportunity to possibly maybe reduce their debt, pay off some credit cards with maybe some very high rates, or actually reduce the number of credit cards you have out there. So maybe have a couple of small cards you want to pay off, or some expenses maybe to reduce your overall debt to improve your cash flow throughout the year. Some people think that my refund is too small to do anything with, but is that a real... It's never too small. You know, say you have a small credit card that you want to pay off, or you have something coming up at an important expense that you're going to need, that maybe it's a high efficiency appliance, maybe it's going to make your life a lot easier in the long run by saving some money. What kind of tools and tricks and tips are you going to be giving here today at the presentation? Yeah, we're just really going to talk about budgeting, using your money wisely on a month-to-month basis. Things like important things to include in your budget. You know a birthday is going to come up. You know a vacation is coming up. Build that into your budget so it doesn't throw you off. Or some expenses that may be flexible, things that you can adjust, maybe adjust to take out of your monthly budget. And what about investing? Should people still be looking at that? Yeah, I think it's one, it's important to invest in yourself. It's important to set that money aside for unforeseen expenses. Maybe to have six months' worth of a cushion if you do lose your job or if you do need expenses covered for a period of time if you get ill. It's important to have six months' worth of income set aside. Different investors have different types of needs or different personalities. What are some of the categories of investors that you're familiar with? Well, I think people, wide range, some people are very conservative. People want to look at long-range opportunities. But you know the majority of people that we're looking at budget and we're trying to look at in the very short term what they can do to kind of make their budget work for them. And what's the one key piece of advice that you can give people? Just to take the time to break it down and put a budget in place and kind of try to stick with it as best as possible and always reassess because there's things you can tweak in your monthly budget to actually make it really work for you.