Free Tax Service
I have been filing my taxes the last few years with a free online service called Tax Act. I saw that Turbo Tax is now offering a free online service so I thought I’d give them a shot this year. I am glad I did. Sure they try to sell you an upgrade every so often, but overall, the interface was very easy to use and much less confusing than Tax Act. I usually do a dry run on paper before I start my online return so that I have a rough idea of what it should look like and Turbo Tax’s results were strikingly similar to what I had figured. There are a few tricky parts in my return and I am glad to know that even if I had filed myself with a pen, I would have done it properly.
One such area is how to apply tuition to a return. One option is to us it as a deduction. The other is to use it as a credit. In my case, the deduction was the most beneficial.
Another area of concern is with my children. There are a number of credits available to families and I always dislike having to work my way through the worksheets to see if I qualify for them. “If line 4 is greater than half of line 5 multiplied by 15.75% (0.1575), enter the lesser of lines 4 and 5 on line 6 and subtract it from line 38 on your 1040.” Turbo Tax did these for me.
I also sold my house this past year and I had no clue how to figure my capital gains. Once again, Turbo Tax made it easy.
One final perk to using TT…they will eFile your return for free! How nice! I always hated trying to order the gazillion pages correctly and making sure all my w-2s, 1099s, and 1098s were in order. I spent maybe 3 hours working on my Fed this year. It works for me!
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