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Comment by foxyv | Hacker News Reader

Did my taxes this year using TurboTax like always. Sold some stocks this year and all of a sudden I am paying $90 for TurboTax "Premium" to put a couple additional entries in the 1040. What a racket. Next year I'm going to file using something else. This has gone on too long.

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Let me know if you find anyone that is better. I'm sick of TaxAct premium for the same reason.

I'm ready to go back to doing my taxes by hand and mailing them in. (I'm old enough to remember doing that - it is faster than doing it on the computer except for the one year I forgot to copy line 13 of form 1234A to line 56b of form 9876B) So many dark patters where the software is pretending to take time doing a complex calculation that takes a computer a couple nanoseconds, not to mention all the time to skip over things that don't apply to me.

FreeTaxUsa is great for most usecases, including stock sales. It is free for federal filing, state is a bit extra ($10)

Plus until now they always have 10% off with code FTUSA10

I also would vote for FreeTaxUSA, they have served me well. I do however note the irony of them being named FreeTaxUSA and in the same breath, mentioning that it costs to file. Especially given the context of the thread in general.

FreeTaxUsa forced me to manually enter my stock last year, I had to provide a supplemental PDF form outlining each transaction.

Obnoxiously, this year TurboTax's integration with Binance is broken. I haven't checked in a few weeks but it won't accept Binance CSV's either. This needs to be fixed soon.

TuboTax web or the desktop application? Last year their Schwab integration was broken on the web version but not on the desktop version.

The web version

I used them for the first time and it was fine. But it doesn't look like they support the state form I plan to use for this year. Already contacted them asking for it next year, but didn't receive a concrete answer.

I like them for the most part, but FTU tricked me this year by forcing me to upload certain forms for a state EV tax credit, and then just completely ignoring those uploaded forms and not sending them to my state tax agency. I only noticed it because I went over the final packet of state tax forms and noticed the ones I uploaded weren't included.

I'll second free tax usa. Quick process, $10.

To be honest, I think I may just do it all myself like I did back in the early days. I'm a single, high income, earner with few complicated investments and no state income taxes. I may as well just fill out a 1040 myself at this point.

TurboTax tried to double count my Benevity sales anyways and I had to catch it when it messed up the 1040. Why am I paying for software? If I get to the point I can't handle it myself anymore I'll just start paying an accountant.

Dirty secret: all versions of TurboTax have all the forms - you can just switch to form mode and enter the values yourself into the forms.

Even dirtier secret - the government is legally required to publish all the forms in an accessible manner. You can just download them without ever even installing any Intuit software.

Just to back this up with facts - here are the braille and spanish language offerings which took all of two seconds of googling:

https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/irs-tax-forms-in-braille-and-...

https://apps.irs.gov/app/picklist/list/formsPublications.htm...

Note quite all. The IRS wont accept a downloaded 1096.

Yep, though arguably the base turbotax is helpful in filling them out (but after the first year or so you could just imitate the previous year's filings).

I used Cash App Taxes. I sold some mutual fund shares in 2021 and it handled it fine.

Here's a page describing forms and situations it does not handle [1].

One thing that might annoy some people is that to login to the Cash App Taxes website you must use their mobile app. The website shows a QR code which you scan from the mobile app.

It uses the approach of asking you various questions in order to figure out what forms it thinks you need to file, which is an approach that some people do not like.

If there is a form you know you have to do that it missed or you have a 1099-something that it has not asked you to enter it took me a little while to figure out how to deal with that. What you do is type the name of the form into the help search box. One of the results will be a link to take you directly to the page that deals with that form.

[1] https://taxeshelp.cash.app/s/article/Forms-and-situations-Ca...

Cash App taxes has a bug where mortgage interest deduction is not handled properly with state vs federal. If your mortgage is more than 750000$ and your state is California or a state allows deduction up to a million $ in mortgage interest then you will end up getting a lower refund.

I'd double check by filing with another software just to make sure (i.e https://www.freetaxusa.com/)

Cash app also couldn't file my ev credit correctly. Support was significantly worse than useless. Ended up going with Free Tax USA this year but I've also seen bugs with them.

I filed with them last year when it was still Credit Karma Taxes. The process was painless and my first time not filing with Turbo Tax. I was going to file with them again, but the moment I saw I needed to install an app to scan a QR code, I bailed. No thanks. I don't need their app on my devices.

So this year, I prepared my taxes with FreeTaxUSA instead. So far I love it. It required me to manually input a lot of information that was auto-imported on TT and CK, which isn't as terrible as I thought. Overall I'm finding the UX to be very clean and clear. I haven't had to Google answers to vague questions or unique situations like I had to with the others. It even caught an error that I'm having to fix with my bank, and told me exactly how to fix it. I'm very impressed with FreeTaxUSA so far. Hopefully they never sell out.

I use FreeTaxUsa.com. It's free for federal filing.

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