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TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

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Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#111

Post by astura »

gsk22 wrote: post #64
asdfuadirea wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused. Income in an IRA isn't taxed, so that's not relevant for taxes. If you had post-tax investments then yes it's more complicated, but that has nothing to do with IRA/401k retirement savings?

I assume they meant a Roth IRA, which does tax deposits.

Capital gains and dividends in a Roth IRA is not taxed either.

They clearly mean they ALSO had a taxable brokerage account that generated dividends; saying they contributed to an IRA was an (unintentional) misdirect.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#112

Post by stagger87 »

vertis wrote: post #23
metalliqaz wrote: post #4

Yeah they do, of course they do. They are in business to make money, after all. The real story is the absolute travesty of government corruption that TurboTax and HR Block have perpetrated by making it illegal for the government to make tax filing as easy as it should be. It's one of the things I would immediately correct if I was king for a day.

Really makes me appreciate the ATO (Australia). Free online tax filing has been a thing for quite a few years. You end up with an accountant only if your tax is somewhat complex, which tends to correspond with higher income.

So basically the same as the US.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#113

Post by astura »

bunderbunder wrote: post #86
themagician wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only go to prison if you willfully and purposely try to defraud the government. It’s more of a, “Pay what you believe you owe based on your best guess and the laws as you best understand them, and if we disagree we may ask you to pay more.”

> if we disagree we may ask you to pay more The opposite can happen, too. The last time they disagreed with me on how much tax I should have paid, they mailed me a check for the difference.

Same thing happened to my sister! She filled out the tax form, thought she owed, mailed in a check, and then received a check back from the IRS saying they actually owe her and told her where her mistake was.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#114

Post by ultrarunner »

tantalor wrote: post #74
thomasfortes wrote: post #61

It's an idea so dumb that you need to pay for a software that the only reason to exist is for you to pay your taxes, Brazil gets a lot of things wrong, but at least our government provides a software available for every platform (windows, mac, linux, ios, android and even a jar, so if it runs java, you're fine) for us to do our taxes. You need to pay an accountant only if your taxes are complex, and even them will us…

Software takes time to develop, and time is money. Tax software is especially bad because 1. the rules are insanely complicated and 2. the insane rules change every year requiring updates. The real question is why don't we have open-source tax software? I'd argue that since 1. IRS is publicly funded and 2. they have to write code anyway to enforce the tax rules as they change, then they should just publish that code.…

I get what you're saying here (and generally agree), but I really think it's worth taking a step back when "the law is too complicated for humans to follow it; machine-readable versions should be available" starts making sense.

Imagine if the speed limit was a function of current local wind speed (as measured by one of three airports, depending on the time of day), tire pressure, the azimuth of the sun, etc, and that large companies had digital speed limit signs outlawed. Saying, "Oh, we'll just mandate that all cars carry the necessary equipment to calculate the current speed limit" is probably the wrong approach. The solution is to do away with the convoluted calculation because it doesn't add value in the first place.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#115

Post by j_m_b »

cr0sh wrote: post #87
grecy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real story is the absolute travesty of government corruption that TurboTax and HR Block have perpetrated by making it illegal for the government to make tax filing as easy as it should be You know this applies to pretty much every service in the US right? A company wants to make massive profits, so it just lobbies and buys the laws it wants. Healthcare, private prisons, banking, "security" (TSA), education, tra…

I don't know why, but all of this "privatization" bugs the hell out of me. Maybe it has something to with wanting to see my taxes being used properly, rather than going to a private company's profits. Maybe it's the abstraction; that'd I like to know that the workers I see doing the work for the government are government employees, and that I am, in some small way, helping them? I mean, sure, with a private company t…

Ahh yes the classic "muh roads" comment.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#116

Post by behringer »

chrismeller wrote: post #65
dontbenebby wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: As a child comment pointed out, the issue was a brokerage account I opened in addition to the Roth IRA. (The Roth IRA deposit limit is smaller than the 401K deposit limit) /// The problem with that is there's often caveats. Ex: in grad school I did a summer internship, and put my profits into an IRA. Later on, I found out I could not use many free file software, because they considered handling the dividends my…

Exactly this. Amount of income is actually quite a crappy measure for what should be free to file. If it’s flat W2 income with nothing else to consider then sure... When you start adding in all these other little side cases you’ve blown your argument. They literally take more effort (either on your part deciphering and completing, the CPA’s part deciphering and completing, or Turbotax’s part developing and validating…

A 1098 caused me to have to pay turbotax 70 bucks. Instead of doing that, I just switched to H&R block which remained free shrug

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#117

Post by Consultant32452 »

asdfuadirea wrote: post #99
dontbenebby wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may have mispoke. In addition to a Roth IRA, I also had a traditional brokerage account. It's my understanding even if you invest in index funds/ETFs, some of the stocks in the funds generate dividends and those can be taxable even if there's no capital gains tax on the growth in value of the index fund/ETF. Anyways, whether it was from the brokerage I opened or the IRA, I had a class of income that would have made…

That's a rather big misstatement: most lower income people (most people in general actually) won't be investing post-tax, a 1099-DIV really is quite uncommon It's still a shitty and stupid situation... but that doesn't mean it's relevant for most free filers. You should be able to skip the foreign tax credit if you manually enter the 1099-DIV: simply enter foreign taxes paid field on the 1099-DIV as 0, and your tax s…

Am I correct in understanding that interest paid to deposits at a credit union get you a 1099-DIV? And wouldn't that mean virtually everyone who banks at a credit union would get that form? Also, anyone who owns savings bonds or CDs. Those are out of fashion these days, but many people still get them. Your point stands that these are still not the majority of the population, I just wanted to add some more pathways a person might get such a tax form.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#118

Post by dontbenebby »

astura wrote: post #111
gsk22 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume they meant a Roth IRA, which does tax deposits.

Capital gains and dividends in a Roth IRA is not taxed either. They clearly mean they ALSO had a taxable brokerage account that generated dividends; saying they contributed to an IRA was an (unintentional) misdirect.

Yes, I've been upfront about the error, acknowledged it, and I've edited the original post.

I still stand by my assessment it's not cool to nudge people not to save.

There are many people who'd like to save, but don't have 401ks. (Ex: students doing internships, contractors, or people working in the service industry)

The limit for a 401k is ~18k IIRC and ~5500 for an IRA IIRC. If you had say, 10k from a summer internship, you'd put the difference in a normal, taxable brokerage.

Having a brokerage account does not mean one is affluent.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#119

Post by astura »

linsomniac wrote: post #32

I've been using TurboTax for the last 4 years or so but I'm getting pretty tired of this story. I read an article a few weeks ago that mentioned CreditKarma has free tools for tax prep, so I signed up for it and I'm planning on using it next year. I used to use an accountant because my taxes were kinda complicated, but once I sold my business they got really easy. Turbo makes it slightly easier, but honestly the IRS…

I'd recommend https://www.taxhawk.com/. Its 100% free for federal and $15 for state; seems like a pretty ethical company/product. You can even do your federal for free without doing your state (I've done this when I needed to do state on paper for complicated reasons). You can also use it to generate the 1040 and mail it in rather than e-file if you wanted to for some reason. No dark patterns or upsells.

I gave CreditKarma a go last year to see how it compares and in my opinion, the TaxHawk UI is way better than CreditKarma, and the UI is the main reason I'm using tax software in the first place. TaxHawk also covers a lot of cases where CreditKarma doesn't support.

Some people are also worried about the "free" price point of CreditKarma ("if you're not the customer you're the product"). I'm not one of them, personally.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#120

Post by atonse »

rdiddly wrote: post #94

Who wants to just start writing a free version and start putting them out of business? Filing taxes is not the Linux kernel, I mean how complicated is it really? It's still just a matter of following directions and doing basic math. Computers are great at that. No rocket science needed. I even thought of a name: Caesar (as in "render unto..."). Caesar.org is available. At the end it generates a PDF for printing & mai…

It's not hard. It's all arithmetic.

Before people pounce on me for "trivializing it" – I've written, from scratch, Obamacare Insurance calculators that analyzed hundreds of policies with various coverages, coverage tiers, and you could type in things like "If i broke my leg on this policy, how much would it cost?" (all in real-time).

It was a lot of arithmetic but really not that bad (about 150-200 lines of mainly applying coefficients to standard formulas depending on your policy tier), but it was all addition, multiplication, and division. And it really wasn't that bad. Took about 2 weeks.

Update: Just to clarify, an analyst had already done all the legwork of collecting those coefficients and premiums and costs for me. But all I'm saying is that the actual formulas are never that crazy.

I've also written similar calculators for life insurance and travel insurance.

I really doubt the tax calculations are any different.

Ultimately you gotta remember that these laws are made by pretty average humans and have to be enforced by those same average humans. They're going to be vast, but any single rule won't be mathematically complex.

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