Why I give away tax strategy for free

My name is Foad Nabi. I’m an Enrolled Agent — federally licensed by the IRS to represent taxpayers in all fifty states — and I run Help With Tax, where everything is free to read and nothing is sold by appointment. People ask why a credentialed tax professional would publish, at no charge, the same strategies firms bill hundreds of dollars an hour to explain. This is the answer, and it’s also the closest thing this site has to a mission statement.

I started on the cleanup crew

My first years in tax were at a resolution firm. Tax resolution is the industry that picks up the phone after the IRS letter arrives — penalties, liens, audits, years of unfiled returns. It is downstream work. By the time a case reached my desk, the expensive part had already happened, usually years earlier, in the bookkeeping: an account miscoded, a worker misclassified, a quarterly payment skipped, an election never filed.

What stayed with me wasn’t the complexity of the fixes. It was how cheap the prevention would have been. A $40 W-9 habit prevents a $40,000 worker-classification case. A fifteen-minute weekly bank-feed review prevents a $5,000 cleanup and the audit exposure that comes with guessed numbers. The people paying resolution fees weren’t reckless — they just never got the information early enough, because early information is exactly what the industry doesn’t market.

The economics of free

Tax knowledge is strange merchandise: the people who need it most can least afford the hourly rate, and the advice itself doesn’t wear out when shared. Publishing it openly costs me almost nothing per reader. So the trade I’m making is transparent: I give away the systems — the chart of accounts, the safe-harbor formula, the S-Corp math — and what I get back is a reputation that doesn’t need advertising. If you someday want a professional, you’ll already know how I think. If you never do, the material worked as intended.

What “free” means here, concretely

Every article on this site is free, without an email wall. The templates and checklists — the same documents an accountant would build for a client — are free. The S-Corp calculator shows its formula and tells you when the answer is “don’t bother.” Nothing here upsells to a consultation funnel, because there isn’t one.

The standards I hold the writing to

Four rules govern everything published under my name. Plain English — if you need a glossary, I failed. Education before strategy — the why before the how, because strategies on shaky foundations collapse in audits. Real math — worked examples with current-year figures, updated when the law changes (everything on the site reflects the 2026 rules, including the One Big Beautiful Bill Act). No fear marketing — the audit rate for a typical small business is under 1%, and content that pretends otherwise is selling anxiety, not information.