Comment by outworlder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by outworlder | Hacker News Reader

I've done my taxes on Turbotax for a few years, and didn't even check alternate options because I had the perception they were clunky.

I've tried for the first time FreeTaxUSA to prepare my mother's tax return. Guess what? It's even better than Turbotax in some aspects(the UI is similar, but doesn't waste your time with animations), and way cheaper. It only charges you to file state but, if you come from the Free File IRS website (and are under the income requirements), it doesn't even charge you that. There's one upsell for their tax consultants or whatever, but it's only done once.

It does not automatically import W2s though, but that saves you maybe 5 minutes per W2. Not sure about stock transactions import either, it seems they can't import from brokers. I will have to check next year. They do seem to have spreadsheet import, so maybe that's something we (as in, HN community) could fix until they have the feature.

The competition seems to have improved as well, although I don't have first hand knowledge (but watched some youtube reviews where they walk through the filing with every software).

It's time we ditch Intuit. If we can't have free IRS software, then we should at least bleed Intuit dry.

EDIT: it's particularly egregious that Intuit came up with the Free File program as a compromise so that IRS wouldn't have their own tax software, only to leave the program.

I also used FreeTaxUSA. It doesn't import stock, but it's easy enough to just input the stock summaries yourself, and then mail the full stock tax forms from your stock brokers to the IRS afterwards.

I enjoyed freetaxusa as well. Only thing that was a little weird was that I ended up entering some forms out of order and because of that it was saying my backdoor roth ira rollover was taxable income, but when I went back through and re-entered the data it asked me the right questions and gave the right output.

I really love the comparison with previous year(s) on some pages and that helped me spot a real error. The navigation is so much better than turbo tax too.

If anyone is looking to convert from turbo tax, you can import your previous return as pdf and that could cover a lot of details already that don't change year over year.

Note that if you do this and then change your mind, you can't delete your FreeTaxUSA account. You have to manually delete everything you've uploaded and replace your personal information with nonsense:

https://www.freetaxusa.com/help/display_faq.jsp?delete-accou...

> There's one upsell for their tax consultants or whatever, but it's only done once.

It's also worth noting that the upsell is only $7.

Hey, so, TurboTax has a 0% chance of correctly importing my W2s & stock transactions; so, it's not like I even get that. This was my last year of using TTax — if I'd known about FreeTaxUSA, I would've hopped.

Is this something about how they don't handle wash sales across brokers for you, or do they actually screw up importing that one form from your stock broker somehow? If so, how do they screw it up? Would be nice for everyone to know so they can watch out.

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