Oregon made its own turbo tax competitor and it's great, and getting better every year. I was really looking forward to Direct File. (I used an accountant this year so I didn't get my chance.) Back to filing my own returns by hand next year.
Thank you, DOGE brainiacs who decided I had to keep doing it the inefficient way.
USA doesn't need a TurboTax competitor (of which there are many - I worked for one which struggled in the US market). It needs reform. TurboTax should be unnecessary.
I agree that TurboTax should be unnecessary. And if you want to make it unnecessary by simplifying the tax code, go for it. In the meantime, we should have a free and efficient direct-to-IRS method of paying taxes that doesn't rely on paying extra fees to a middleman.
Just found, after seeing this thread, IL also has a great (seems that way) State tax filing website. Good thing - it can import your Federal Return information.
Use Free Tax USA. Federal is free. If you need to file state, it is $15. I’ve used it for years and it works great. For a number of years I prepared my taxes on both Turbo Tax (without actually paying for it) and Free Tax USA. They always came up with the same numbers.
I find that FreeTaxUSA has a much better interface than TurboTax. They don't play games with fake loading screens needlessly making you wait (when we both know that the math involved takes just a few CPU cycles) and make the whole experience much easier with fewer upsells, but the biggest deal for me is that they're far more transparent about how everything maps to the underlying documents.
TurboTax wants you to be scared of the tax forms, so they make it really hard to see what it is that you're actually doing and signing. FreeTaxUSA actively encourages you to look at and understand the forms you're filling out and signing at every step of the way. After a few years with them I actually feel that I could fill out my taxes by hand, but I don't want to because their interface is a genuine improvement on the tax forms, as opposed to TurboTax's which is very much not.
My understanding of the tax code has shot up dramatically since switching to them, and I feel much safer submitting taxes now than I ever did with TurboTax because I understand every single line I submitted.
I prefer Free Tax USA over Turbo Tax. Switched several years ago and haven't looked back.
The last 2 years, I paid the $8 for chat support to answer some questions I had and both times their answers saved me a lot more than the $8. Very knowledgeable and can see my numbers to give me specific guidance and answers.
Does anyone have recommendations to replace Credit Karma? I previously really liked the service, pretty straightforward, but it was recently bought by Intuit. Tried to login over web and it just redirected me to an app.
Wish I hadn't been funding Intuit after using FreeTaxUSA this year. Maybe the import isn't as great, but I found it overall a bit more intuitive than TurboTax
Another vote for Free Tax USA. I’m angry that free file is gone, but these folks seem like they care about the craft of building good software and good interfaces, and I’m happy to pay them for the state return even though it’s easy enough to just copy and paste into the state website.
100%. I've used them for the last few years, and it's as easy as it can be for normie taxes (things can break down if you get into Schedules, but maybe I should have hired an accountant).
I used to be a hardcore "the government should stop playing 'I'm thinking of a number' and just tell me what I owe", but the rise of these internet tax apps has kind of obviated the need. And with multiple competitors, you can even check the others work.
I've heard about this for a few years but never tried. Do they handle like if you have rental income, foreign bank accounts, and other complications? Thanks!
Just another vote here for Free Tax USA. Another point is that they iterate and improve every year. Last year my son had to file in two different states, and the process flow was a bit wonky (you had to create a space holder return for the second state before returning back to the first state form). They fixed it this year and it worked great.
Mr. Bessent (Treasury Secretary) was repeatedly asked during his confirmation hearing whether he would protect DirectFile and he said "Yes" :-)
A small snippet of that conversation. The video recording has much more details -
Do you agree with the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) report finding that the Direct File pilot was successful and should be expanded?
Answer: As noted during the hearing, I commit that for this tax season, Direct File will be operative to prevent any disruptions for taxpayers. And if confirmed, I will consult and study the program and understand it better, and evaluate whether it works to serve the best interests of taxpayers.
I also found that FreeTaxUSA helped me understand my taxes better. A few areas where TurboTax performed some calculation automatically, FreeTaxUSA made me aware that I had eg. maxed out a particular deduction, in a way that helped me change my behavior accordingly.
Just so that you are aware, TaxHawk (which owns and operates FreeTaxUSA) may choose to sell your information in the event of a "business transition" (bankruptcy, merger, etc)
> In the event TaxHawk evaluates or conducts a business transition whether as a going concern or as part of bankruptcy, liquidation, or similar proceeding, such as a merger, being acquired by another company, or selling a portion of its assets, the personal information of users will, in most instances, be part of the assets transferred. Users will be notified, via email and/or through a prominent notice on the FreeTaxUSA.com website, 30 days prior to a change of ownership or control of their personal information.
I was actually fairly impressed with CashApp taxes. It seemed to work fine, it handled my State and Federal taxes just fine. Granted, I don't think my taxes are terribly complicated, but I think they're comparable to a vast number of users.
CashApp taxes is free and had zero upsell. I don't know what information they are farming out of this and if I did it might end up disturbing me, but at least it's free and was easy to use.
Cash app is the best bar none. The only problem is part year state income taxes which I have to fill by hand.
I got the opportunity to learn about something like married, filing separately, on a single return or something because of course oomur tax policy is like a jury rigged bug fix on top of a bug fix.
Another +1 for FreeTaxUSA. This is my second year using it, and I think they do a great job. It’s more “hands on”, but I think they offer a strong value.
Yes, one might argue it's a little misleading, but it comes across as significantly more genuine and less scammy than TurboTax. The federal filing is completely free, no matter which forms you have, and you just pay $15 per state. They also have the standard support upsells, but they don't push them crazy hard (I think it's one prompt between the federal and state sections).
I've used them for the past several years, never had any issues. Paid for audit defense one year when my return was especially complex (luckily haven't needed it yet).
Federal (USA) taxes are always free with them no matter what complications you have. They only charge for state filing or for live support. Seems fine to me to call it that.
Regardless of what happens to Direct File, I recommend people learn how to do their tax returns by hand. I do it by hand every year. Yes, it is tedious, but I am not beholden to anyone and I don't need a "product" (paid or otherwise) to solve it for me. It takes me between 10 to 15 hours per year for both my federal and state tax returns. That is all. Once you get a hang of it, it is not that bad.
(I recognize that not everyone can do this, but if you have the technical skill to handle the math, I do still recommend it.)
10-15 hours? Turbo Tax usually costs me like $50 or so after discounts through my bank and I can nail out my taxes in under an hour with all it can auto-import in my situations. If it saves me 14 hours of labor its definitely worth $50 to me, and I'd say I'm massively overpaying compared to the free filing tools out there!
The cost of Turbo Tax is not the just what you pay for the service. The real cost is that they now have a very detailed financial picture of you and your family and they will market that to any willing buyer (I will never be convinced that they don't do this).
The cost of giving money to Intuit is that they then give it to politicians to create a more convoluted tax return so that you are further locked into giving Intuit money every year.
If you can get through turbotax in under an hour (and are able to use their $50 version!) you probably can do it by hand in under two. Hint: If nothing changed year-to-year, just look at last year’s tax return. It is probably a 1040-EZ, and all you have to do is copy this year’s numbers from whatever documents turbotax copied them from last year. Then, read the directions for the form and do the arithmetic.
At some point in a few years, this will stop working, and you’ll probably overpay by thousands.
Anyway, it took me well over three hours to use turbotax this year, which is faster than most. An hour of that was reverse-engineering their calculation error which made my refund too high, and certainly would have triggered a sternly worded demand for more money and a fine (or worse) from the IRS. I know this because they made another error a few years ago, and it cost me 16 hours on hold with the IRS and thousands of dollars.
Having said that, I’d have overpaid a few thousand this year and spent at least 8 hours doing it by hand.
On the bright side, if Trump succeeds in burning the federal government down, maybe a simpler tax code (like the rest of the first world has) will emerge from the ashes of the IRS. If not, then he won’t be president any more.
So, at least it’s not 100% bad.
Edit: I just noticed you’re using auto-import! If that’s saving you time, you’re making a big mistake. Intuit doesn’t reliably save all the documents you’ll need when the IRS sends you a nasty letter. Go manually download as many of them as you can, and file them for 7 years.
If paying for TurboTax works for you, that's great. If you find it worth the money, that's great. It's just not worth it for me and wanted to tell people there is another way.
I never said it is hard. Slow and tedious, but not hard. I take my time. I probably could speed it up, but I usually listen to music while I do it and try not to stress myself out about it.
This is equivalent to compiling every package from source for your Linux install. You don't end up learning too many useful things, all you've done is a very repetitive tedious task that doesn't give you much financial return.
I second this. Although I only hand filed for two years and then transitioned to FreeTaxUSA. The benefit is that after going through their wizard/interface, I can confidently check the generated IRS forms to make sure it’s filled to my intent.
My Australian tax return takes me about 20 minutes.
The system prefills 99% of the details that they've obtained from my employer, bank, health insurer, stock broker etc directly. All I need to do is fill out my deductions from a running spreadsheet I've maintained throughout the year.
My greatest pet peeve in life is when people make ME work to pay THEM money. I don’t understand why the gov can’t just tell me how much I owe and I pay.
It took me 58 minutes to do my not that simple taxes (both state and federal) using Turbo Tax. The cost was about $200. Based on your time estimate, it saved me 1-2 work days of time. That seems like a good bargain to me.
What I don't like with Intuit is the sleazy ways they try to upsell you and to trick you into allowing them to use your financial information for non-tax purposes.
Mine took the same time and only cost $15 because my state charges. Freetaxusa. I could have done it for free if I mailed my state, but whatever. My taxes are also well above what's average(personal plus 2 biz).
TurboTax is a rip off. There are dozens of free websites that do the same thing: ask you a handful of questions and fill out a spreadsheet/form.
$200 is mind bogglingly expensive for doing it yourself. TurboTax does nothing that dozens of other FREE services don't also do. It's just a few questions.
Would love to read a blog post on this. 10 - 15 hours is probably too much but I bet if I learned how to do it I could figure out how to optimize it with all the tools that are available today. Would love if TurboTax just died because everyone figured out they could do taxes on their own with just a little supplemental help from local models or something similar.
If you just have W2 income and take the standard deduction, taxes are really quite simple to do on paper. It's a two page form, most of which you leave blank.
If you have self-employment income, business income, capital gains, 401k distributions, HSAs, 529 plans, etc. it can get complicated but at that point TurboTax honestly doesn't help all that much (unless it's gotten a lot better since I last used it). If you get to the point that your taxes are too complicated to do by hand you probably need an accountant anyway.
10-15 hours is NUTS. I do mine by hand every year and I can get them done in about 3 hours. I would say my taxes are nontrivial thought certainly not super complicated (no K1s)
I don't think I'll make a blog post about this, but since you asked I will describe what you have to do briefly. 10 to 15 hours includes everything:
- Downloading all forms and instructions.
- Downloading all 1099s and W-2 statements.
- Scanning any paper 1099 or W-2 forms I receive (rare now, thankfully).
- Filling out a draft of the forms slowly in pencil. This takes the most time. I have sometimes used spreadsheets for this but I find it is quicker to just use a calculator or even the Python REPL.
- Filling out a "hard copy" of the forms and double checking my math. This takes more time than you think if your state don't have fillable forms, but I have sometimes done it by hand very neatly rather than typing it up.
- And finally going to the post office to mail things. I never just put them in my mailbox.
2024 only took 11 hours in total mostly over 2 weekends. And as I have said in other posts here, I don't stress myself out about and take my time. You can probably do it faster if you want to.
The key is to just read the instructions for each form and follow them mindlessly and mechanically. I will admit that it is difficult at first, but you do get used to it, and despite my tax returns getting much more complicated over the years, the number of hours that I take has stayed the same.
I used to use TurboTax but then compare the pdf it generated line-by-line to the pdf from the previous year, and caught things I'd missed fairly often. One year though I was having trouble finding where in the UI the field I needed to set was, and concluded that the whole process was stupid. I then switched to just filling out the forms directly using my previous year's as a guide, and found that it just didn't really take any longer. This year I spent about an hour on my taxes with W2 income, RSUs (with an incorrect cost basis), ESPP trades, dividend/interest income from four different brokerages, and some stock trades to report.
I do think TurboTax or a competitor makes sense when you have a novel-to-you tax situation to deal with. Probably the hardest part of filing taxes is just figuring out which of the supplemental forms are applicable to you. I absolutely would have missed the foreign tax paid one on my own, for example. When your tax situation is the same as the last year just with different numbers I don't see much of a point.
i did it by hand till 15 years ago. created a spreadsheet, with only the items I needed.
the next year, pretty much the same spreadsheet with whatever minor tax changes had been made for that year.
the 15 hours is mostly spent getting your shit together which you have to do for an online solution too.
I did a better job than my accountants do, they often forget little details that I would keep track of. ("no, I did not owe a penalty, the estimated payments and refund carried forward meant there was enough money on my tab...")
I do my (Canadian) taxes by hand also, but not exactly.
I calculate all the fields using my homebrew software. All calculations are done there.
The software produces a report which is organized by form and field. I can go through it and just put the indicated values into the right forms.
The forms are fillable PDFs. I copy and paste most of the values.
The last few years, I had perfect results; no correction came back from the Canada Revenue Agency.
This year, that d1ckhead Justin Trudeau left us with a surprise; complications to the Canada Pension Plan. Something like a 40% of all the line items in my tax calculation are from the new CPP schedule 5. It has multiple brackets now. I had to redo that section of my system (redefine the model). That is tedious. Anything same as last year is a breeze.
I had to model a whole new form this year since I worked for two employers and overpaid EI (employment insurance). The common forms handle CPP overpayment. For EI overpayment there is no "heads up" in the workflow at all. Since there is a deduction for EI payments, you have to do it right; you can easily screw up and naively calculate and claim the overpayment, while keeping the deduction calculated from the the overpaid amount.
Anyway, when I used to work with just pen and calculator, it took me about, oh, a bit over an hour or so. 10 to 15 hours seems crazy for personal tax. Is this for a moderately complicated corporation, where you're saving money by not hiring an accountant?
There is an old russian tv series called Kitchen where the mc starts his job by stripping the labels from bananas. On the question "what is the sense of that", he gets the answer "for balance in the universe - somewhere there, there is someone else putting the labels on the bananas".
Spending 15 hours on filling data that the government mostly knows and can calculate is exactly one of those balancing acts of the universe that nobody needs.
I have the technical skill to handle the math, but there is no way that I'm spending fifteen hours to do my taxes when there's a free-to-low-cost thing readily available that will do a similar or better job in like 45 minutes.
I used CashApp taxes this year, and I liked it. It was actually free and it didn't do any upsell in the process.
Your mileage may vary. I did taxes by hand for a few years, probably 20+ hours each year, every hour stressful.
For example, at some point, I'm fatigued and surprised how much work it was thus far, but I think I can see the finish line on the horizon, but then one line in a form triggers a cascade of additional schedules and many more hours.
Then, finally, the federal forms are done, and it's a stack... And the state forms are somehow not just a 1-pager of quickly copying key numbers from federal 1040, but seem (subjectively) to more than double the work, and produce a second stack.
The last 2 tax years, I decided it was a really unhealthy amount of stress, so I've bought TurboTax Home & Business. I run it in a KVM instance that gets airgapped, on principle, so my data doesn't get sent to corporate surveillance capitalism HQ.
Though I don't assume that TurboTax in airgapped VM will keep working every year. But, hopefully, before they inevitably break it some year, and I'd have to do taxes by hand again, I will be killed by a crocodile.
Maybe I'm just out of touch because I haven't done taxes by hand for years, but 10 to 15 hours? After I read your first sentence, I seriously expected you to say 2-3 hours.
I don't doubt that it really takes that long for you. I just think it's ridiculous that anyone should spend that amount of time on something that should be a lot more simple, streamlined, and efficient.
I'm not OP, but if you are a reasonably high-earning professional common on this site, you trigger a ton of stuff. I used to take about that long to do mine, although I've gotten much faster. In a normal year, I typically file forms 1040, Schedule A, Schedule B, Schedule D, Schedule 2, 6251, 8606, 8949, 8959, 8960, 8995 + state versions of some of those. I'm also married, so I calculate all permutations of joint/separate with itemized/non-itemized, which also requires you to actually figure your taxes instead of leaving it blank and letting the IRS do it.
It gets really complicated very quickly, but if you are single, have less income, and it's only from wages, it's much simpler.
I don't have a particularly complicated return, to be honest. I just take my time and don't stress myself out about it. The time includes everything, not just the time I spent putting in numbers.
You may find it insane, but I'm OK with it. I'm not going to knock somebody for doing something different, but I do think it is important to know how to do it yourself when push comes to shove.
Free tax programs are what allow taxes to become so complex that you need a program (or paid CPA) to help fill them out. I refuse to have to get a program to fill them out.
A big benefit of filling out yourself is knowing how to minimize the tax burden. Using a program or CPA you never really understand how tax is calculated and the tax consequences of various financial choices you make throughout the year.
I recommend this, as well, especially if you have repetitive taxes.
I spend just a few hours doing taxes by hand when it's are similar to the previous year. With an accountant, I have to spend a bunch of time getting things ready, anyway. I only pay them when something weird happens.
The average tax payer takes the standard deduction and doesn't require anything special. There is absolutely no reason for this process to be privatized for the typical American.
There’s also no reason for anyone not to make coffee at home with what affordable modern coffee machines can do but Starbucks remains in business, against all odds.
I believe companies should use every inch of leeway in existing laws to do business. It isn't evil, it is rational. However, I believe evil companies are the ones that attempt to change laws to do business. Businesses should not have a voice in law. Intuit is an evil company and they are making the lives of every person in the US worse in order to make a profit.
This take is inconsistent. Lobbying is perfectly legal, so Intuit isn’t being evil, just being rational.
Companies, like people, can be evil while not committing any crimes. Intuit is not even that evil when compared to most larger companies in the US. We only remember it exists during tax season.
> I believe companies should use every inch of leeway in existing laws to do business.
So dark patterns are good? It was good for cigarette companies to discover tobacco is addictive and take advantage of that by selling cigarettes to kids?
After all, this was legal until people fought a brutal grassroots war against tobacco companies to fix it.
I got into a discussion a while ago with a friend of mine that liked to think of themselves as libertarian. No beer was involved, but going to the absurd definitely came out. He tried to take the view that the government should get out of everything. My counter was that very quickly some company would take over enough of each market to effectively become the government and dictate terms to everyone else. My point to him was that -something- fills that void so at least if it is the government doing it there is a slim chance I can influence it. This is a bit indirect to your comments, but my big point is that I don't want companies ever trying to set the bar or come up with morals because their version of 'good' won't be one that is good for society. If we expect them to be 'good' they will define it and I want society to do that, not them. Dark patterns are bad, but we need to start holding our government accountable for not holding companies accountable. We also need to hold ourselves accountable for buying from those companies. I assume every company is adversarial because that is the nature of capitalism and I don't want to slip into the false security of 'they will eventually do the right thing because it is the right thing...'
> I believe companies should use every inch of leeway in existing laws to do business. It isn't evil, it is rational.
This is the exact argument Jeffrey Skilling presented to me to explain his actions at Enron. He further expanded saying, “You would have done the same thing in my position.”
It’s possible to be both evil and rational. Now regardless of the legality of Skilling’s actual actions—when considering whatever viewpoint he convinced himself of—one must consider ethics and whether or not they are intentionally misleading people in their actions. It can absolutely be evil. How many people lost their entire retirement savings when Enron went under?
I think companies should focus on being helpful to humanity instead of being profit maximizing machines, but that probably won't happen in my lifetime.
> I believe companies should use every inch of leeway in existing laws to do business.
No. You can do things that are immoral, harmful, predatory, and generally shitty while still being perfectly legal.
And people who want fewer regulations hampering businesses need to realize that this only works if businesses work within ethical guidelines that are not mandated by law. Otherwise the government will need to step in and protect people.
But to reiterate: Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's not evil.
Correct. Not saying the OP is, but many people conflate morality and law. They are completely separate, except for a few laws that might be inspired by moral concerns.
That's just 2025 Q1 lobbying money. They've been at this for quite a while and spent a lot more than just $240k. They just finally got an administration in office that's openly willing to make the government less efficient and less cost effective.
Because that's not why it happened. There's just an assumption in American politics that whenever anything bad happens it's because of "corporations" and not ideology.
Republicans are against easy tax filing because Grover Norquist makes them all sign pledges against it, not because of lobbying.
Corporations and ideology are not orthogonal concerns. The Republican small government ideology is about moving power out of democratically-accountable public institutions into accountable-only-to-their-owners private ones.
I had to google this name and I found that he "makes" them sign a pledge to not raise taxes and to simplify tax laws, not to a pledge to oppose easier tax filing.
Most companies do lobby - they just prefer donating to industry coalitions, because it helps reduce the chances of negative press one way or the other.
That said, ime the RoI isn't that hot for the amount of time and effort spent, as relationships do matter more than money as some point political donations have diminishing returns.
That’s what I was thinking… I would expect the lobbying to be way more of their budget, since their entire business model depends on keeping the status quo.
Readit News
Thank you, DOGE brainiacs who decided I had to keep doing it the inefficient way.
What I read in the article is an account of corruption on a staggering scale, permeating the democratic foundations of the US.
https://tax.illinois.gov/programs/mytax/il-1040.html
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TurboTax wants you to be scared of the tax forms, so they make it really hard to see what it is that you're actually doing and signing. FreeTaxUSA actively encourages you to look at and understand the forms you're filling out and signing at every step of the way. After a few years with them I actually feel that I could fill out my taxes by hand, but I don't want to because their interface is a genuine improvement on the tax forms, as opposed to TurboTax's which is very much not.
My understanding of the tax code has shot up dramatically since switching to them, and I feel much safer submitting taxes now than I ever did with TurboTax because I understand every single line I submitted.
The last 2 years, I paid the $8 for chat support to answer some questions I had and both times their answers saved me a lot more than the $8. Very knowledgeable and can see my numbers to give me specific guidance and answers.
Never give money, business or data to Intuit
I used to be a hardcore "the government should stop playing 'I'm thinking of a number' and just tell me what I owe", but the rise of these internet tax apps has kind of obviated the need. And with multiple competitors, you can even check the others work.
Edit: A partial answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724779
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A small snippet of that conversation. The video recording has much more details -
Do you agree with the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) report finding that the Direct File pilot was successful and should be expanded?
Answer: As noted during the hearing, I commit that for this tax season, Direct File will be operative to prevent any disruptions for taxpayers. And if confirmed, I will consult and study the program and understand it better, and evaluate whether it works to serve the best interests of taxpayers.
From page 36 at https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/responses_to_qu...
So he evaluated not to expand :-(
From https://www.freetaxusa.com/privacy
>> Business transitions
> In the event TaxHawk evaluates or conducts a business transition whether as a going concern or as part of bankruptcy, liquidation, or similar proceeding, such as a merger, being acquired by another company, or selling a portion of its assets, the personal information of users will, in most instances, be part of the assets transferred. Users will be notified, via email and/or through a prominent notice on the FreeTaxUSA.com website, 30 days prior to a change of ownership or control of their personal information.
CashApp taxes is free and had zero upsell. I don't know what information they are farming out of this and if I did it might end up disturbing me, but at least it's free and was easy to use.
I got the opportunity to learn about something like married, filing separately, on a single return or something because of course oomur tax policy is like a jury rigged bug fix on top of a bug fix.
I've used them for the past several years, never had any issues. Paid for audit defense one year when my return was especially complex (luckily haven't needed it yet).
They have up selling services like a prepaid debit card and whatnot, but all that is optional.
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(I recognize that not everyone can do this, but if you have the technical skill to handle the math, I do still recommend it.)
It shouldn't be this hard.
At some point in a few years, this will stop working, and you’ll probably overpay by thousands.
Anyway, it took me well over three hours to use turbotax this year, which is faster than most. An hour of that was reverse-engineering their calculation error which made my refund too high, and certainly would have triggered a sternly worded demand for more money and a fine (or worse) from the IRS. I know this because they made another error a few years ago, and it cost me 16 hours on hold with the IRS and thousands of dollars.
Having said that, I’d have overpaid a few thousand this year and spent at least 8 hours doing it by hand.
On the bright side, if Trump succeeds in burning the federal government down, maybe a simpler tax code (like the rest of the first world has) will emerge from the ashes of the IRS. If not, then he won’t be president any more.
So, at least it’s not 100% bad.
Edit: I just noticed you’re using auto-import! If that’s saving you time, you’re making a big mistake. Intuit doesn’t reliably save all the documents you’ll need when the IRS sends you a nasty letter. Go manually download as many of them as you can, and file them for 7 years.
You may not have Rental income and Stocks to report
I never said it is hard. Slow and tedious, but not hard. I take my time. I probably could speed it up, but I usually listen to music while I do it and try not to stress myself out about it.
Dead Comment
If you have multiple brokerage accounts, RSUs from an employer or two, maybe some consulting income, etc, it's annoying and tedious.
And if you have a business, doing it by hand basically means you'll overpay by a good extent.
The system prefills 99% of the details that they've obtained from my employer, bank, health insurer, stock broker etc directly. All I need to do is fill out my deductions from a running spreadsheet I've maintained throughout the year.
What I don't like with Intuit is the sleazy ways they try to upsell you and to trick you into allowing them to use your financial information for non-tax purposes.
TurboTax is a rip off. There are dozens of free websites that do the same thing: ask you a handful of questions and fill out a spreadsheet/form.
$200 is mind bogglingly expensive for doing it yourself. TurboTax does nothing that dozens of other FREE services don't also do. It's just a few questions.
If you have self-employment income, business income, capital gains, 401k distributions, HSAs, 529 plans, etc. it can get complicated but at that point TurboTax honestly doesn't help all that much (unless it's gotten a lot better since I last used it). If you get to the point that your taxes are too complicated to do by hand you probably need an accountant anyway.
- Downloading all forms and instructions.
- Downloading all 1099s and W-2 statements.
- Scanning any paper 1099 or W-2 forms I receive (rare now, thankfully).
- Filling out a draft of the forms slowly in pencil. This takes the most time. I have sometimes used spreadsheets for this but I find it is quicker to just use a calculator or even the Python REPL.
- Filling out a "hard copy" of the forms and double checking my math. This takes more time than you think if your state don't have fillable forms, but I have sometimes done it by hand very neatly rather than typing it up.
- And finally going to the post office to mail things. I never just put them in my mailbox.
2024 only took 11 hours in total mostly over 2 weekends. And as I have said in other posts here, I don't stress myself out about and take my time. You can probably do it faster if you want to.
The key is to just read the instructions for each form and follow them mindlessly and mechanically. I will admit that it is difficult at first, but you do get used to it, and despite my tax returns getting much more complicated over the years, the number of hours that I take has stayed the same.
I do think TurboTax or a competitor makes sense when you have a novel-to-you tax situation to deal with. Probably the hardest part of filing taxes is just figuring out which of the supplemental forms are applicable to you. I absolutely would have missed the foreign tax paid one on my own, for example. When your tax situation is the same as the last year just with different numbers I don't see much of a point.
the next year, pretty much the same spreadsheet with whatever minor tax changes had been made for that year.
the 15 hours is mostly spent getting your shit together which you have to do for an online solution too.
I did a better job than my accountants do, they often forget little details that I would keep track of. ("no, I did not owe a penalty, the estimated payments and refund carried forward meant there was enough money on my tab...")
I calculate all the fields using my homebrew software. All calculations are done there.
The software produces a report which is organized by form and field. I can go through it and just put the indicated values into the right forms.
The forms are fillable PDFs. I copy and paste most of the values.
The last few years, I had perfect results; no correction came back from the Canada Revenue Agency.
This year, that d1ckhead Justin Trudeau left us with a surprise; complications to the Canada Pension Plan. Something like a 40% of all the line items in my tax calculation are from the new CPP schedule 5. It has multiple brackets now. I had to redo that section of my system (redefine the model). That is tedious. Anything same as last year is a breeze.
I had to model a whole new form this year since I worked for two employers and overpaid EI (employment insurance). The common forms handle CPP overpayment. For EI overpayment there is no "heads up" in the workflow at all. Since there is a deduction for EI payments, you have to do it right; you can easily screw up and naively calculate and claim the overpayment, while keeping the deduction calculated from the the overpaid amount.
Anyway, when I used to work with just pen and calculator, it took me about, oh, a bit over an hour or so. 10 to 15 hours seems crazy for personal tax. Is this for a moderately complicated corporation, where you're saving money by not hiring an accountant?
Spending 15 hours on filling data that the government mostly knows and can calculate is exactly one of those balancing acts of the universe that nobody needs.
I used CashApp taxes this year, and I liked it. It was actually free and it didn't do any upsell in the process.
For example, at some point, I'm fatigued and surprised how much work it was thus far, but I think I can see the finish line on the horizon, but then one line in a form triggers a cascade of additional schedules and many more hours.
Then, finally, the federal forms are done, and it's a stack... And the state forms are somehow not just a 1-pager of quickly copying key numbers from federal 1040, but seem (subjectively) to more than double the work, and produce a second stack.
The last 2 tax years, I decided it was a really unhealthy amount of stress, so I've bought TurboTax Home & Business. I run it in a KVM instance that gets airgapped, on principle, so my data doesn't get sent to corporate surveillance capitalism HQ.
Though I don't assume that TurboTax in airgapped VM will keep working every year. But, hopefully, before they inevitably break it some year, and I'd have to do taxes by hand again, I will be killed by a crocodile.
Just use their website, pick your battles.
The government is going to use software to process your stuff anyway, and whatever contractor makes that software will sell it to TurboTax.
I do my personal, my 2 LLCs in under 2 hours. I also do my roommates W2 which takes 10 minutes. The whole thing costs like $35.
Seriously, how does it take you 10+ hours? I do not understand at all. Lol
I don't doubt that it really takes that long for you. I just think it's ridiculous that anyone should spend that amount of time on something that should be a lot more simple, streamlined, and efficient.
That’s insane.
It gets really complicated very quickly, but if you are single, have less income, and it's only from wages, it's much simpler.
You may find it insane, but I'm OK with it. I'm not going to knock somebody for doing something different, but I do think it is important to know how to do it yourself when push comes to shove.
A big benefit of filling out yourself is knowing how to minimize the tax burden. Using a program or CPA you never really understand how tax is calculated and the tax consequences of various financial choices you make throughout the year.
I spend just a few hours doing taxes by hand when it's are similar to the previous year. With an accountant, I have to spend a bunch of time getting things ready, anyway. I only pay them when something weird happens.
Also, fuck Intuit.
Companies, like people, can be evil while not committing any crimes. Intuit is not even that evil when compared to most larger companies in the US. We only remember it exists during tax season.
The really evil companies manipulate markets, evade labor laws, crush unions, exploit vulnerable users, enable authoritarian surveillance, trivialize wars.
All without breaking a single law.
So dark patterns are good? It was good for cigarette companies to discover tobacco is addictive and take advantage of that by selling cigarettes to kids?
After all, this was legal until people fought a brutal grassroots war against tobacco companies to fix it.
This is the exact argument Jeffrey Skilling presented to me to explain his actions at Enron. He further expanded saying, “You would have done the same thing in my position.”
It’s possible to be both evil and rational. Now regardless of the legality of Skilling’s actual actions—when considering whatever viewpoint he convinced himself of—one must consider ethics and whether or not they are intentionally misleading people in their actions. It can absolutely be evil. How many people lost their entire retirement savings when Enron went under?
Corporations need to be redefined to serving society first, a sort of Prime Directive.
No. You can do things that are immoral, harmful, predatory, and generally shitty while still being perfectly legal.
And people who want fewer regulations hampering businesses need to realize that this only works if businesses work within ethical guidelines that are not mandated by law. Otherwise the government will need to step in and protect people.
But to reiterate: Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's not evil.
Republicans are against easy tax filing because Grover Norquist makes them all sign pledges against it, not because of lobbying.
That said, ime the RoI isn't that hot for the amount of time and effort spent, as relationships do matter more than money as some point political donations have diminishing returns.
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