Creating a Person Out of Thin Air

Last year I was talking with a fellow OBB tax counselor and she mentioned how amazing she felt to help someone get a $6,000 tax refund. I agreed and told her that if she thought that was great, wait until she did a $10,000 tax refund. That would really be something.

She replied, "This is not a contest."

That's absolutely correct. Helping a single dude with a single W-2 (like me!) get a little bit back can be just as rewarding as helping a low-income mother of three receive a whopping Earned Income Tax Credit. Once you embrace the value that people shouldn't have to pay to get their taxes done, the number of people served becomes even more important than the number of dollars generated.

That being said, I really want to show off about all the refund dollars I helped people get back at a tax clinic in Millersburg, Ohio earlier this month.

I had four clients over the course of five hours. It just so happened that each client was due a massive return. Two were due over $9,000. After all was said and done, The Ohio Benefit Bank and I had injected over $25,000 into the community. In just five hours.

Think about how much money that is! That is like creating a fictional Millersburg citizen and giving him/her a full-time job. That money will be spent on local goods, local services, and improve the quality of like for an entire town. That is a huge stimulative impact and The Ohio Benefit Bank's tax services made it possible.

And that was just me. As Erin previously mentioned, there were other counselors there doing the same thing. Luck of the draw meant that I got all the big money clients, but they were all working the same clinic from beginning to end allowing the good people of Millersburg to get their taxes done for free within the span of an hour. Helping that many people get that much money back is about as good as it gets in this line of work.