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About the author
Christina Cruz is a certified public accountant and small business financial strategist who has spent the past fifteen years helping independent workers and self-employed professionals take control of their finances. She is the founder of Cruz Financial Planning, a firm dedicated exclusively to serving freelancers, gig workers, and solo entrepreneurs who need practical financial guidance without the overhead of a traditional accounting practice.
Christina earned her Bachelor of Science in Accounting from the University of Texas at Austin and began her career at Deloitte, where she specialized in small business taxation for five years. The experience taught her the technical side of tax law, but it was the conversations with her clients that changed her perspective. Over and over, she heard the same story: talented, hardworking people who were losing thousands of dollars each year to preventable tax mistakes — missed deductions, late filings, poor record-keeping, and the quiet fear that the IRS was always one audit away. She left Deloitte in 2014 and founded Cruz Financial Planning to offer a different approach: clear, actionable guidance that any independent worker could understand and implement on their own.
Her practice has since served over 800 clients across all fifty states, from freelance graphic designers earning $15,000 a year to six-figure consultants building agencies. She has prepared over 2,000 tax returns for self-employed individuals and has represented dozens of clients in IRS audits and correspondence, with a 100 percent success rate in reducing or eliminating penalties. Her clients describe her as the rare accountant who can explain complex tax concepts in plain English without condescension or jargon.
Beyond her client work, Christina is a contributing writer for Forbes' small business section, where she covers tax strategy, financial planning, and the business of being self-employed. She has been quoted as a tax expert in The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, and CNBC. She speaks regularly at freelance conferences and small business events, and her quarterly tax webinars have reached over 10,000 attendees.
What sets Christina apart is her focus on systems over shortcuts. She believes that no amount of tax-season hustle can replace consistent year-round financial habits, and that the entrepreneurs who succeed financially are not the ones who find the most creative loopholes but the ones who build simple, sustainable systems they actually stick with. Her writing is grounded in this philosophy: she doesn't promise secrets or tricks, just clear principles and actionable steps that work.
Christina lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and two children. When she's not working with clients or writing about taxes, she can be found trail running on the Barton Creek Greenbelt, reading historical nonfiction, or testing out new recipes in her kitchen. She runs a small side hustle of her own — a weekend ceramics studio — which she says keeps her connected to the challenges her clients face every day: the joy of creating something from nothing and the never-ending task of keeping the books straight.
