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Comment by nightski | Hacker News Reader

For many if not dare I say most TurboTax is among the cheapest because it is free. The fact is if your situation is simple (a W-2 and the standard deduction) then you can get away with just about anything.

The truth is the IRS doesn't send reports because this country is obsessed with deductions. Your income (which the IRS does know about) is a small factor in the entire equation.

Ironically, under Trump's tax cuts, the standard deduction was made a lot larger (while removing the availability of some deductions). This pissed off the people who loved those deductions, but in the end it made the standard deduction applicable to a lot more people.

If you aren't taking deductions, then you can just use any of the services for free and don't really need to worry about dark patterns.

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I remember there was a huge issue among the teachers unions that teachers wouldn't be able to deduct up to 500 dollars anymore for classroom expenses (I may have the number wrong). I was thinking, you teachers should be good at math and realize your deduction being doubled is way nicer than having that classroom supplies deduction. Also, why isn't the school paying for your expenses (but that's a whole separate conversation)

You are thinking about this wrong. When you are in a situation where you take the standard dedication then you suddenly lose the benefit of doing any tax-deductible actions. So teachers across the board were immediately disincentivized from buying school supplies because it’s effectively not tax deductible anymore.

I rant about this all the time with charitable donations. Any behavior the government wants to incentivize through tax policy — charitable donations, student loan interest, IRA contributions should be credits that apply in addition to the standard deduction because otherwise there’s no incentive for most people.

Are you really suddenly not going to spend $500 on your students because now only $450 of it goes towards goods instead of the full $500? That doesn't really make any sense to me. Especially if the standard deduction grants you an additional $1k that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

By that reasoning there was never even a point to having the deduction in the first place.

If you believe incentives are the only point of deductions, then sure. I believe part of the reason for deductions is to provide some relief to people who are spending for their work or for the state. In any case, I'll take favorable taxes however I can get them, even if it means I no longer benefit more from itemized deductions over the standard deduction. Especially since the standard deduction is much easier.

I wonder how many teachers ever benefited enough from itemized deductions to take it?

Honestly though, we also need to ask why teachers are having to spend money out of pocket at all. We pay all these taxes, shouldn't the schools be able to afford photo copies?

I think you're right on how the policy works, but look at the math. The standard deduction doubled, so as an equation New_deduction > old_deduction+school supplies

Teachers came out ahead

And they come out even more ahead if they stop buying classroom supplies.

no argument there. Would you agree with me that it'd be better if the schools provided all the materials that a teacher needs, instead of them paying out of pocket for supplies? I'll sometimes pay out of pocket for work supplies but I just get reimbursed so it's no big deal.

I would if the source of the funds remained at the federal level.

If you sold a single stock throughout the year you are excluded from all the free tax filing software I’ve seen. A bunch of my income is in RSUs. For us I need a VM to run TurboTax

I have filed with all sorts of wild overcomplicated ISO/ESPP/RSU/NSO/etc employee stock compensation and never had to use anything other than the webapp. Why do you need to run the desktop application at all?

I used FreeTaxUSA with a Wealthfront account that had stock trading. Wasn’t charged.

FreeTaxUSA is strangely under-mentioned on these threads. I’ve used it the last couple years with a complex-ish situation. Not a single complaint.

I tried it last year and really liked it.

I initially tried it because CreditKarma had egregious errors last time, like:

1) Inverting my answer to “have you sold cryptocurrency” on the forms.

2) Silently removing decimal points (changing 8.005 to 8005 shares in the forms)

3) Persisting an entry for income after I tried to delete it and re-enter, with no way to fix it even after talking to support.

4) Having forms with an overlay “do not use”.

FreeTaxUSA still refused decimal points in the forms (like in item 2) but at least warned me so I could work around it.

didn’t know about it until i browsed /r/tax

I’ve done my taxes with FreeTaxUSA for a few years as well. The webapp is simple, with no swooshing animations - but it gets the job done for 1/4 the price of TurboTax these days.

A few years ago I benchmarked the two together and they basically gave the same answers. They also don’t hold your past returns hostage.

I’ve been recommending them to everyone that I talk to about taxes.

For me no animations (except a real loading circle) is a plus point. I don't want to spend time looking at a fake circus display of taxes. Its form filling, I just want to fill data and be done with it.

> A bunch of my income is in RSUs. For us I need a VM to run TurboTax

No you don't. I've sold stock more years than not and I've never needed to do that.

> TurboTax is among the cheapest because it is free

Free? Haha in what world?

It's free if your taxes are covered by:

* W-2 income * Limited interest and dividend income reported on a 1099-INT or 1099-DIV * Claiming the standard deduction * Earned Income Tax Credit (EIC) * Child tax credits * Student Loan Interest deduction

basically if you don't sell any assets, have employee stock compensation, or donate a ton of money you can file for free.

Also if you aren't filing your state taxes.

Pretty much everyone has to pay if you use turbo-tax, the "free" edition is not an IRS free file offering they don't advertise that one. There are very very very limited cases to not be hit by a "surprise" you need to upgrade and pay us from with money from your tax return. A staggering percentage of people who would have eligible to file for free under the IRS program end up paying because of the dark patterns, and the misleading marketing you for whatever reason are perpetuating.

2 years ago 37 Million people filed online who were eligible to use an IRS free file offering and only 6.8% did... [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xQQkzWhMOc&ab_channel=Netfl...

[2] https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-just-tricked-you...

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