(MONEY Magazine) – Robert Thomas has always valued self-reliance. In just six years, Thomas, now 42, and two friends have turned a doddering aircraft-refueling company they bought at the Tompkins County airport in Ithaca, N.Y. into a bustling, $3 million fueling and air-charter business serving VIPs, including presidential campaigner Jesse Jackson. And around his Trumansburg, N.Y. home, Thomas and his homemaker wife Laurie, 37, do most of the repair work themselves on the renovated 1840s farmhouse where they live with their three children. Says Thomas: ''If I'm capable of doing something, I just don't feel comfortable paying someone else to do it for me.'' Thus, come tax time, Thomas prefers to take on his 1040 singlehanded. He doubts that a paid preparer would save him enough time or money to justify the fees. ''Even with an accountant I would still have to organize my tax data,'' he reasons. ''I don't need to pay someone $50 an hour just to fill out my forms.'' When he actually sits down to fill out his return, usually in mid-March, Thomas brings with him a copy of J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax and the relevant IRS publications. But he also keeps an eye out during the rest of the year for tax-saving ideas. This year, he is taking advantage of an angle that was promoted in ads for local banks: substituting fully deductible mortgage debt for consumer debt, which is currently only 40% deductible. By taking out a $12,000 home-equity loan -- no more than the amount that he needed to pay off his existing car loan and credit-card balances -- he will be able to write off about $800 in interest payments that would otherwise not have qualified as a deduction. The Thomases' financial situation is fairly straightforward. ''I have only a few sources of income and deductions,'' he says, ''so there's not much to miss.'' Virtually all the household's income comes from Bob's $35,000 salary. Exemptions, IRA contributions and the few itemized deductions he will take -- mainly for mortgage and home-equity interest and local income and property taxes -- should drop his taxable income this year to about $15,000, for a federal bill of $2,200. Still, tax reform has made the simple return an elusive thing. Because Thomas leases his own plane, a four-seat Piper Warrior, to his company for use in flight instruction and for rental to other pilots, he is now entangled in the new tax code's byzantine limitations on passive-activity losses. Thomas estimates that he took three hours -- 15% of the total time he spent on his return last year -- to calculate the $2,000 paper loss on the transaction and to figure out how much of that he was allowed to deduct. (The answer: $1,300.) Last year, Thomas asked his company's C.P.A. to review his completed return, which the accountant did, gratis. Though the accountant found nothing amiss, Thomas plans to run this year's 1040 past him as well, just to be safe. ''Some of these new IRS forms are ridiculously complicated,'' Thomas says, with exasperation. ''Wasn't this supposed to be the Tax Simplification Act?'' -- E.S.

BOX: THE BOTTOM LINE Time spent: 20 hours Fee saved: $350