Im sick of turbo tax but im worried of getting a lower return due to the complexity of my taxes. Im doing itemized deductions (worth it for me this year). How it is?
Freetaxusa does a pretty decent job of making sure you include all income and deductions in the tax return.
If you own a business and heavily play the stock market and casino to make money, its better to have an accountant do it.
I've always done my taxes myself. They are super simple these days. I could still do it by paper, but this is so easy I finally made the switch to filing online. Then the state taxes are cheap, so worth it.
My state doesn't and I still pay for the basic option, to support them. I filed with them in 2025 and 2026 and am very happy. They beat Turbo Tax by a mile.
Your reminder that Turbotax is just a product, the company is called Intuit and they have their hands in a lot of things. Though oddly they own Credit Karma, but not Credit Karma Tax which is Square/CashApp. I use FreeTaxUSA but I hear the CK Tax is alright too.
I’ve used Cash App Tax for it for a few years, going back to when it was called Credit Karma Tax. Free to use and super easy. Federal and state, never had any issues (except for the couple of years that I lived in multiple states, it couldn’t handle more than one state return)
Me and my wife did H&R Block. It’s expensive and I kinda hate it but it has a lot of options. Also they have been good in years past when we’ve needed to talk to a person. Also it’s easy to save your credentials and use the same service year after year.
I helped my oldest do her taxes via free tax USA switching from turbo tax. Most was easy but the end/last years AGI question was difficult. If we had that info saved it was on a non booting computer. Went through the irs’s tax history to get the answer.
I hired a local accounting firm suggested to me be an old co-worker. I'm older, and over the decades I've accumulated all sorts of weird complexities to my situation, and just the documentation for my tax forms is a couple hundred pages now. It's not worth my time and effort, and I don't have the experience necessary to confidently assess what applies to me and what doesn't (at least in some cases). Best to leave it to a professional.
I know the free site I use allows multiple 1099s. Might have been stocks then? I know I could enter DIV forms without issues but I haven't sold anything in a taxable brokerage
I use Turbotax.
I know there are free options but it’s only like 45 bucks at Costco.
And I am used to the format
Honestly, I’m just too lazy to change
At the end of the day, 45 bucks is a small price to pay for a streamlined process I can work through with my eyes closed
>At the end of the day, 45 bucks is a small price to pay for a streamlined process I can work through with my eyes closed
Tbf there are free options that are just as easy, if not easier. I would understand if the free choice was complex
I said the same but tried FreeTaxUSA this year because TurboTax was charging me $180. FreeTaxUSA imports your previous information from TurboTax. I can't recommend it enough.
Same. Used it since I started working, so two decades now. Know there are probably cheaper options out there, but ease and familiarity makes it my default, and I usually end up doing our taxes and the taxes for a few family members.
Went with TurboTax because h&r block really upped the expenses this time. Was going to go to an actual dude but it turns out he was going to charge the same amount as TurboTax. I have a secondary freelance job which technically counts as self-employment for some reason and I have travel expenses for that and the form I have to fill out for that ups the expensiveness of every single business that does taxes things
I work at a library that has a service where AARP volunteers do returns for seniors/low income/basic taxes. The guy in charge offered to handle mine since all I really have is a w2 and a mortgage.
There is a free option and it works just fine. Been using it for years. You’ll get asked a million times if you want to upgrade to make use of xyz benefits, but for me at least, it’s unnecessary.
I used to hire a tax preparer for the first few years of getting my first job. However, I realized he wasn't giving me any suggestions on tax planning and all that. I was so naive that to think that more tax refund is good. Once I realized my tax withholding strategy was wrong, I decided to learn and do my own taxes from then on. At first I used the popular paid software like TurboTax or HR block but after a few years I realized I was doing the same things every year and that my tax situation was actually straightforward, so I moved on to the free tax software.
Every Black Friday for the past 10 years or so I have gone to Newegg and bought the HRBlock State and Federal software. It's usually between $20 and $30. I think I have to pay another $10-20 on top of that for e-filing. Let's just say $50.
One year during COVID, I was worried that I needed tax help so decided to go to HR Block office and file that way. It wound up costing me about $300...and they used the same software and they were not really that great to deal with.
If you are unable to file for free, I recommend HR Block. For $50 you can e file, I usually get paid direct deposit in like 1-2 weeks. They also offer free help if you get audited, which likely isn't the best help, but any help during a stressful time like that is great. The other awesome benefit to using the same one every year, it automatically imports your unchanged information to the new year. I would pay $10 just to not have to do that every year, pain in the ass. Also they have the auto-link thing to your pay stub so you just type in a number and code and boom your 90% done with your taxes.
Ok I lived with my parents until recently. Health issues wct. My parents claimed me up until they couldn't anymore. So when I had to do my own taxes I just went to the place my parents went to. An actual accountant
Moved from TaxAct to FreeTaxUSA this year and won't be looking back. I live in Texas, so no state income tax to worry about and FreeTaxUSA was much easier to deal with regarding reporting my backdoor Roth.
I have always filed myself, and typically using some online free option. I've used TurboTax until they started playing games to make the free level difficult to unlock. I also used the IRS's fillable forms when they were available (harder, but reliably free). Lately I've used H&R Block's free option.
I mean, you can just enter them is as short-term and long-term summaries then attach the 1099-B's to your return. Done and done in like, 5 minutes. You DEFINITELY don't need to type them all in!
...unless you're saying you have 1099-B's from a ton of different places? In that case, my sympathies.
I mean, it depends on how much work it takes to do your taxes.
I work at a bookkeeping and accounting office, and for "basic" tax returns, we usually bill around $150 to $200.
The more complex the tax return, the higher the price. Business / proprietorship income? Investment income? Capitals gains and/or losses? Rental income?Expenses to track (motor vehicle expenses, rental expenses, etc...)?
A "big" tax return featuring some (or all) of those can easily reach into the $1,000 to $1,500 range with the time it takes for us to compile everything.
Used to do it myself but now my taxes are complicated enough that I only feel comfortable using a pro. Probably paying too much, but I enjoy the nice cozy feeling of knowing I'm not going to jail.
Eh, I think people don't realize you have to fuck up really bad for the IRS to throw you in jail. Like owing them hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of years, and then ignoring all of the letters you get in regards to it.
Yeah, I’ve made mistakes on my taxes. I just sent corrected forms or documents I forgot and everything got sorted. The IRS are actually very reasonable so long as you’re not actually trying to commit fraud.
Exactly. People are getting thrown in prison over fraud, not simple mistakes. Like you said, they are pretty easy to work with as long as you don't ignore them.
i switched to [TurboTax](https://featherab.com/shopit?search_keywords=TurboTax) a few years ago and honestly it's been worth the money for me. my situation got a bit more complicated with freelance work and the step-by-step guides saved me so much time. before that i used [H&R Block](https://featherab.com/shopit?search_keywords=H%26R+Block) tax software which was fine too. both have free versions if your taxes are simple. i just got tired of staring at forms and second-guessing myself.
For me, I still have mountains of 1099b forms to type in, and I work 70-80 hour weeks.
Spending my 1-2 off days a month filing taxes isn't exactly my idea of fun.
Tax service.
Ours is a bit more complicated than the average family.
My significant other offers piano lessons in addition to their teaching job. They also inherited farmland in another state that generates income from cash rent.
We also have a college student that attends school out of state. He maintains part time jobs in both states.
We have someone do ours. It is too complicated for us to know what is deductible and with our different investments. Back when we were young and had nothing to our names we did them ourselves. After we moved overseas it got way over our heads to do them.
I had complex taxes this year and Turbotax had a deal for an "expert" to do my taxes for $150 total for both fed and state. Couldn't resist. But it turned into a bit of a mess. I had to teach their "expert" some basic tax fundamentals. It got done, seemingly correctly in the end, and was a lot cheaper than it would have been otherwise, but I can't recommend it.
I’m a CPA so I do mine and my mothers. I use Turbo Tax due to being familiar with it and stored information, and also we both have tax situations that make filing free unlikely (LLC income for me, capital gains for mom). I might explore cheaper options next year though.
The administration killed IRS direct file, which as basically the IRS's own tax filing software.
The free e-file program that has existed for many years still exists.
For a fee. All kinds of upsells are offered, but the odds of being asked even a simple question are remarkably low. Unless you're playing games, the odds of a full-blown face to face audit are very close to zero.
This is valid. The only downside is having to retype the same information twice. It's worth $15 to me just to have everything transferred to state automatically.
CPA. I got w-2s, 1099s, schedule E, two different home office expenses, donations, my shit's bananas, and I need someone to help me calculate my quarterly estimates. I'm fine paying for a little peace of mind and having someone else's butt on the line if a mistake is made.
I use an accountant and always have. I'd rather spend the money to have it done right than risk whatever chaos I would accidentally do if left to my own devices.
Do it myself with the official "free fillable forms".
People make it out to be much more complicated than it is. Sure, some people really do have complicated situations, especially if you are insistent on absolute minimization of your tax burden. But most people's situations are very straightforward. Even my situation - I have both a W2 job and run my own business as a sole prop - isn't *that* complicated, but I also don't care about trying to figure out how to claim every little thing to save a little bit in taxes. I'm sure I could pay a CPA and they could find something else I could claim as an expense, but I highly doubt it would even come close to being equivalent to their fee. No sense in paying $100 to "save" $10.
CashApp has a free file program with no upsells for federal or state. I've double-checked against the IRS free-file service doing it myself and I get the same results but with better form filling and organization.
Freetaxusa. Federal is free, and the state costs money, but not much. $15.99 for California.
I have a healthcare workers discount (20%) for Turbotax and got to the very end, and it was well over $100. They also charge you to take their fee out of your refund. Without the discount, it is closer to $200. So I went with Freetaxusa and got the same amount back.
Turbotax can go to hell.
I just use H&R Block. My tax pro with them is awesome and has netted me awesome returns every year. Fair rates too. She's an awesome person to work with and I've been with her for years, so it's one of those "why change it up when it works fine?" situations for me.
They are!! I do my part and gather all my tax forms together into a single pile and then send them to her. She has all the work done within 48 hours, then we get on a call together to go over the details. Then I sign and we're done. It's been so easy. That's what I love about it.
My dad. I’m sorry lol. I’m lucky my dad used to do that stuff for a living before other jobs and then retirement. Someday I’ll have to have him teach me how to do it
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