TurboTax hasn't tricked me into doing anything. I am fully aware that all the forms can be completed manually. I can still remember my Dad sitting at the kitchen table for several nights with all the forms and a calculator every year. The fees TurboTax charges are worth it to me because I don't want to have to sit at the kitchen table every year and hope that I understand the instructions well enough to fill out all…
Even on TurboTax they're required to provide the basic 1040-EZ form for free all the way to filing, they hide that fact below a LOT of bullshit though to make it hard to find the actually free version of the service.
Having used Credit Karma in the past, you should know that it can be...dangerously confusing...for anything other than the happy path. Things like backdoor Roth contributions (which aren't that exotic, tbh) were very confusing in credit karma, to the point where I actually did my taxes with another service just to verify that the calculations were correct, then submitted with CK. I found several mistakes in the CK re…
I do this too: I prep my taxes in both TurboTax and in CK, make sure they agree, then submit in CK for free.
Yeah, I'm normally pretty cheap with this stuff, but this is painful enough that I just decided to pay for some software this year. At some point, "cheaper than an accountant" becomes the guiding principle...
(definitely not defending Intuit here, though. Tricking people into paying is not cool.)
TurboTax hasn't tricked me into doing anything. I am fully aware that all the forms can be completed manually. I can still remember my Dad sitting at the kitchen table for several nights with all the forms and a calculator every year. The fees TurboTax charges are worth it to me because I don't want to have to sit at the kitchen table every year and hope that I understand the instructions well enough to fill out all…
The federal government could very easily do all that for free and it wouldn’t cost fifty dollars per taxpayer.
Knowing the federal government, I can easily imagine it costing MORE than $50/taxpayer. Just we don't pay for something directly doesn't mean it's free.
You can thank Grover Norquist[1] for that. The Taxpayer Protection Pledge [2] that he promulgates to US republican lawmakers is the primary mechanism though which those legislators justify blocking simplification and streamlining of tax filing. If it's easier for people to pay taxes the government will probably ask for more cash if we implement those systems, right? Therefore it must be blocked according to the pledg…
Theoretically, the ideas he's talking about make sense. If say, you're a single person w/ no dependents who doesn't itemize making the process much simpler is attractive. However - as Ted Cruz showed everyone - being able to do your taxes on something the size of a postcard is only possible if just about every specific deduction is cut out. Once people saw that, it was DoA. Also, while I'm here, can someone explain w…
Even then 90% of the 1040-EZ is instructions on how to actually use the form. If you cut all that out and just have the boxes to fill with labels it's not much bigger than the post card it's just needlessly hard to file.
This is why I gave up on online tax filing back in the mid 2000s. There is always some reason you can’t do it for free and you don’t find out till the last step. I’ll just mail in the paper forms, thanks. Only takes a few minutes if you follow the simple instructions.
Every year I do my taxes on H&R Block or one of the others right up to the point where I review the form and the next step is to submit. Then I write all the numbers down and file for free on Free File Fillable Forms. https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form... Thanks H&R!
This is a massive waste of time, if you use TaxHawk/FreeTaxUSA (same company/software different website) you can just e-file your federal return for free without copying information to another place. Yes, it's actually free, you don't have to pay anything or even give out your credit card number. If your state doesn't have income tax you're done, you pay nothing. If you want to continue on to e-file your state, it's…
I do my taxes manually entirely on paper and send them in. I don't want H&R Block, Intuit, Taxhawk, or anyone else to have that information that they will then turn around and monitize. I also like the painful yearly reminder of the unnecessary burden the government is placing upon its citizens. For the majority of W2 income earners, the IRS already has everything it needs to compute your taxes and send you a refund or a bill in mid-February.
>And yet what am I going to do but use turbo tax again. The perceived risk and effort of using a non-automated system to fill them out doesn't seem worth the cost. I'd suggest FreeTaxUSA.com as an alternative. Federal is always free, and state taxes are ~12/state. I don't have anything obscure about my taxes, and their forms indicate they can handle much more complicated situations than I have. I've used them for 3 y…
Why not use the official IRS free file forms?
I did in college. If your tax situation is nontrival it can take a very long time and has lots of room for error. I made a mistake and owed a $200 penalty for it back then. Software walks you through it and automates all of the arithmetic, number copying, and prevents fat finger errors.
I used to say turbo tax wasn't that bad, and that free filing was easy if you just ignored their promises to save you money if you upgraded. Last year however I got all the way to the end of the process where they revealed I made too much and had to pay. That felt extremely unethical, as the information required to come to that conclusion was available far earlier in the process. And yet what am I going to do but use…
>And yet what am I going to do but use turbo tax again. The perceived risk and effort of using a non-automated system to fill them out doesn't seem worth the cost. I'd suggest FreeTaxUSA.com as an alternative. Federal is always free, and state taxes are ~12/state. I don't have anything obscure about my taxes, and their forms indicate they can handle much more complicated situations than I have. I've used them for 3 y…
>I will say their system is a bit clunky.
Interesting, I use TaxHawk (parent company to FreeTaxUSA, same software) and I find their UI excellent.
The Patriot Act (the show) had an episode about this issue, and they debuted a website at the end that has links to multiple free file services: https://www.turbotaxsucksass.com/
The federal government could very easily do all that for free and it wouldn’t cost fifty dollars per taxpayer.
Knowing the federal government, I can easily imagine it costing MORE than $50/taxpayer. Just we don't pay for something directly doesn't mean it's free.
This is an ideological knee jerk response, it’s not true that only the private sector can create software systems. There are 143 million taxpayers in the United States. If each one pays 50 dollars then that’s seven billion, 150 million dollars per year. I think they probably come with some way to do it a bit cheaper than that.