I just file my taxes by hand and mail it in. Somewhat less concern with 3rd parties holding my information and losing it to leaks/hacks.
It is free.
A little obnoxious but the forms do have instructions/directions.
It is free.
A little obnoxious but the forms do have instructions/directions.
No restrictions on income, etc. but federal returns only. You get an email from them within 24 hours of whether your return was accepted or not. It's still obnoxious but for easy returns it seems better than buying turbotax or whatever people use instead.
One time I reproduced the forms in a spreadsheet following the instructions and it wasn't much different from doing the online wizards. I would have liked to mail it in but I just paid to e-file anyway.
I can't really make an authoritative comparison of filing methods because I'm mostly a die-hard paper filer and have only ever e-filed maybe twice in my life at most. And it was long enough ago that I barely remember, and in fact never really cared, how fast my refund arrived. I embrace and savor the luxury of simplicity. When will my refund arrive? Answer: sound of one hand clapping. It's a reminder I put in the calendar for like, mid-June, to the effect of "Hey did I get my tax refund yet?" Usually the answer's, yep, and you dismiss the reminder. I can't be arsed (as they say in the UK) to be more interested in it than that.
Now we're also not talking a lot of money. +- a couple of thousand, usually less. But you would have to compare apples to apples which would be the e-file fee vs. the compounded inflation rate for the time difference in receiving, presumably, your refund. I suspect it's a wash.
You need to also factor in the ${turbotax} fee and/or the accountant, as well, if you don't actually fill out the forms yourself.
Fun fact: We moved from AZ to GA last year, and dutifully filed in each state. I am pretty familiar with AZ due to filing our own taxes for most of 25 years, but GA is much more complex, verbose, and quite stupidly, even aggressively, vague.
I produced a spreadsheet for my wife to evaluate that presented my first time interpretation of the GA partial residency filing. We're both B.S. ChE, she's an MS ChE, I'm a MS App. Math. So we know our numbers. The tables were low risk, low refund, medium risk, medium refund, high risk, high refund. She chose medium risk. Fine with me.
Both AZ and GA refunded something like 50% higher than what I filed and expected.
Some sort of emoji here.
That is, the last time I filed online it took I think practically a year before they got to it (I think the year of the pandemic)
I figure there's so few people filing by mail these days that they're able to process them faster than the huge amount of online filing.
I'm guessing they're separate teams (online vs mail). However I have no idea.
Regardless mailing has worked better for me the last couple years.
Additionally I do not have to use the third party ID verify thing (might just be for accessing information on irs.gov) that I am just sure is going to have a breach and can not for the life of me fathom why our government (Federal) needs a private company to verify the identity of a citizen via government (State) resources.
In any case, I’m complicated enough I just outsource to an accountant. Yes it’s expensive but I’ve never had an issue even with very thick tax filings.