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Comment by ozzythecat | Hacker News Reader

You hit the nail on the head. Actually, we used TurboTax, got annoyed with the constant upsells, and the $80 fee (it was advertised as free), and then my husband redid our taxes using another website (freetaxusa). It was actually free.

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Huge upvote for freetaxusa. My wife was worried that it wouldn't be as good so we did our taxes one year on both services simultaneously. TurboTax's interface was so bad it took almost twice as long to complete the same work and the refund was the same.

Why would I pay for a worse interface? We don't have trivial taxes either, we have our own business and investment income. TurboTax was way worse about not letting us skip over stuff we don't have. It creates single question pages one after another instead of just sticking them in a list so you can skim through them all at once and select only the relevant ones.

I would love to use one of the free products. Unfortunately, for me, TurboTax is the only one I've tried that will import all of my brokerages... Seems small price to pay.

And they always get me with the "Audit defense"... I am not sure how useful it will be if I ever get audited (I err on the side of caution when doing taxes), but still some small extra amount of money for extra peace of mind...

Since I'm not a tax professional at this time, I can tell you that your odds of being audited are somewhat random and usually very low unless your filing is off by a certain percentage in some fields/parameters. Lower income folks are more likely to be audited. The audit "defense" just means you'll get x hours of professional time if you were audited to represent you during an audit. On the whole, the odds of being audited are usually so small it's usually just free money for Intuit.

CashApp Taxes provides audit defense for free: https://taxeshelp.cash.app/s/article/Audit-Defense-when-you-...

> TurboTax is the only one I've tried that will import all of my brokerages

That's trivial; don't throw your ranch so easily. You only have to copy few fields from your 1099 form and the instructions are very clear - which fields to copy and paste where.

It's the form 1040 that forces me to use TurboTax. In any given year, I have hundreds of entries...

Nice. I will definitely be giving this a shot next year.

In my case, Turbotax did a better job helping me figure out my taxes this year.

I tried freetaxusa but there were a few things that turbotax provided clearer guidance on. There was one particular issue where I was quite stumped with Freetaxusa, but Turbotax explained it.

I believe Turbotax also found one or two things that freetaxusa didn't point me towards. But it was all kind of a haze at this point so I might be misremembering.

I don't want TurboTax to be better, but for me it was better this year. I really hate their lobbying. I'll give try more options next year.

I went "screw it, let's get a local tax person".

US is a country where IRS is legally obligated to make you screw up as much as possible.

Agree, finished taxes with Freetaxusa and figured out backdoor roth conversion, included freelancing income, dealt with a schedule k-1. So much less obnoxious than TurboTax, which I have also used but which makes me angry for all the reasons discussed in this thread. Yes, Freetaxusa charges for the state return, but it's also the case that I can't file electronically for free in my state at all (?????). Spouse wants to do paper on principle, which I acquiesced to last year, but.... our paper federal return from last year has literally still not been processed (check was cashed 4/8/2021).

I've been using freetaxusa for years due to outright refusal to give Intuit a dime and it's been great.

I'm somewhat new to the Roth thing and this year it flagged an excess contribution issue, which feels like it would have turned in to a prolonged and painful ordeal if I hadn't gotten the heads up to correct it before filing.

I just wish it let me put my return in to I-Bonds.

> it's also the case that I can't file electronically for free in my state at all (?????).

Up through the 2020 tax year, it was possible to e-file state taxes for free using state fillable forms (like you can use free fillable forms for federal taxes). But intuit decided to no longer provide that service this year.

i just did my taxes last night and checked freetaxusa seems like they charge for state though? I ended up using credit karma's app which was still annoying after intuit bought them and they were forced to sell the tax software to square, and it required I download the mobile app first. It was much better in the past

They do charge for state taxes. It’s like 15 bucks per return with not that much up sell. I’ve used them when I had simpler taxes and liked them over other common preparers

I help friends and family and I can't recommend freetaxusa for simple returns enough. It's so much cheaper if you're doing your own taxes. Tax slayer is decent as well.

What were the complications that FTUSA could not handle, if you recall?

I switched to freetaxusa this year (from TurboTax), and after such a wonderful experience working through my somewhat complicated taxes I was happy to pay them $15 to save me the trouble of typing the information into my state's free-but-lowball-government-contractor website.

I previously used CreditKarma for prior years taxes. This year I didn't strictly because the whole thing feels like a push to just get you to install CashApp on your phone. And that is on top of not wanting to use anything Intuit owned anymore. I'll gladly pay $10 to file my state taxes if I can avoid them giving it to Intuit.

CK Tax was sold to Block as a part of the acquisition by Intuit - Intuit sees nothing from it any more.

Yeah, they charge for state, but much less than Turbotax charges for state.

Of course this is a bit of a sore point for me since my state used to have free online tax filing but H&R Block got their rep voted in and killed the program "to save taxpayer money", it cost the state about $40k per year to run and now instead we have one of the highest e-filing costs in the country.

I've used that service for a decade and never paid them a penny, I think there are a few services they bill for but I don't need. The UI gets only minor changes and it still basically works as it did ten years ago, so I appreciate the consistency as well especially for something I touch once a year.

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