What about being a CPA makes you want to drop it?
Hmmm...where to start.
First, the good parts about it.
I have the sweetest job I could ask for. I work for one of the big accounting firms, and work with fabulous people. I do taxes, which is very seasonal, so there are a lot of slow times. During those slow times, I don't work. I don't get paid when I don't work (which is a bit of an issue), but I can structure my hours to work around whatever I need to. This has allowed me to be at home when my kids get home from school, go to school for the past couple of years, go on fabulous trips when my kids are on break, etc. In fact, I'm headed to Tucson tomorrow morning for a few days with my husband. I'm taking work with me, which is another good thing - I can work remotely just about as easily as I work in the office.
I get paid fairly well as an hourly person. There are many people in my office who make more money than the doctors I know. Obviously, money is not a motivating factor for me.
Public accounting (which is the entry point for most CPAs) is basically divided into audit and tax. I realized when I was in college that auditing is not unlike grading papers, and if I wanted to grade papers for a living, I'd have been a teacher, so I chose tax. Most people who end up working for private companies (as CEOs, etc.) have a background in audit, so I limited myself there.
Within tax, the routes to take basically are doing taxes for people or for companies. Early in my career, I did a lot of both, but found I disliked people taxes less. Company taxes tend to be more complicated, it is easier to get bogged down in minutia, and they have to balance. My attention span is not really long enough to stay focused, and I procrastinate...a lot. (Obviously, I
finally got around to fulfilling my life dream!) Needless to say, being a perfectionist, I get depressed when I procrastinate and continue the cycle. It's not pretty.
So, I do individual and family group taxes. Most of my clients make more money than I will ever see, and many of them are very nice. I have chosen to stay at a non-managerial level all these years...getting into management means that while you make a lot more money, you have to grade papers, and you have to sell services. I hate selling. With a passion.
Anymore, many tax services are a commodity, and being a CPA not seen with the same prestige it once was. With the proliferation of tax software products, anybody and his brother can do what I do, for a lot less money and training (see note below regarding PAs). My billing rate is in the stratospheric range. To prove the point that anybody and his brother can do what I do, my own firm chose to outsource much of our work to India a few years ago. Fortunately the experiment did not last as originally envisioned, but for a year or two, we would scan our workpapers here, the returns would be done overnight in India, and the product would be reviewed and printed here. Cultural differences were most obvious when it came to listing the names of charities..."Any Baby Can" (a charity here in San Antonio) came back listed as "Any Baby COW" from India.
Needless to say, I will be steering clear of any specialties that can be outsourced - radiology, pathology, etc.
It doesn't help me any that I get really annoyed at companies and people who make a lot of money and hang on to it all. There are too many people in this world who feel no social responsibility to give to charities or to even pay their fair share of taxes (property or income). I have seen enough instances of poor money management and tax "aversion" to make my head spin. People who have million dollar incomes and million dollar mortgages who give $1000 a year to charity, but have enough mortgage interest deduction and trustee fees from their trusts that they pay a lesser effective tax rate than I do.
😡
My mother encouraged me to look into either a PA program or a CNP program rather than taking the long road to being an MD. While I have great respect for PAs and CNPs, I realized that with my experiences as a CPA (vs a "tax preparer"), I couldn't go that route. It would be settling for less than I really wanted, and that won't cut it. There is still a level of prestige associated with being an MD, and, ok, I need it.
Ok, that's the gist of it. I've had to do a whole lot of soul-searching in the past several years to determine for certain and for sure why I went into accounting instead of medicine in the first place (that one is a novel), and whether this is the right move for me at this time (it is).
In many ways, I am ready to walk away from my job and never look back, but I will miss my baby Dell. There is a sense of security that comes with a job you've held for a long time, and with a career. I have not decided for certain, but I probably will keep my CPA license active for at least a few years. I can always make a few bucks here and there, and again, it is a security blanket.
Off to tackle the play room!
