Prior to FreeTaxUSA, I used TaxSlayer, H&R Block, and Intuit. Intuit does surprise me by charging roughly the same as a CPA firm but for a "do it yourself" service.
I'm probably stereotyping here, but I noticed Americans are more willing to pay for a service, where Europeans are more penny-pinching and don't see why they should pay for something they can do themselves. I guess American love their businesses, where we see them sometimes suspiciously.
Your one year of living there exempted you from that
Very inconvenient, I know.
that and most Americans dont have the budget to pay or hire someone to challenge if theyre worried about how to do additional filings
It's not like you are using questionable deductions and barely legal maneuvers. Be honest in the first place. Tell them you had a good-faith effort to do your taxes and made a mistake.
Any person who do not is just valuing their time more than the cost of tax preparation services. FWIW, I only spend about four hours every year doing my taxes myself. Which is less than the time needed to research a tax preparation service, communicate with them, and then check the results.
The docs are pretty well written...
I use the same service, but for just federal, and they are upfront about state filings costing $15 rather than surprising you at the end like Intuit/TurboTax.
The only "automation" I now use is an Excel spreadsheet, put out each year, for free, by Glen Reeves, (https://sites.google.com/view/incometaxspreadsheet/home/chan...)
Happy I live in Romania now where it is basically 1 form with between 1 (company/cap gains) and 5 (lots of extra income) lines to fill out (and 80% of people don't need to fill anything), submit and get your owed taxes in about 5 minutes.
For most people just getting paid by an employer, they'd just need to fill out one short form. For more complicated situations, that site has the other forms you need, and some of them are set up to auto-calculate values across forms.
> $15 total
Sounds like a scam to me.
I should probably figure out how to get notified if they get acquired or something though.
I agree with everyone that it should be a completely unnecessary product, but I don't feel that it is excessively expensive for what it does.
The email address is at the bottom of every page.
I still think it's wrong that HN needs my email address to delete accounts and comments, but yes I finally broke down and did this their way.
I'll miss the good parts of this community, but the selective moderation and toxic flag-or-downvote-truths-i-dont-like-instead-of-discuss-them parts of the community have ruined this site for me.