[Novalug] [OT] Tax Software

[John Franklin]

I'll +1 TurboTax Online.  I've used it for eight or ten years now as  
my taxes have steadily become more and more complex, from simple  
itemization, adding home rentals, a 5-figure home-damage insurance  
claim, unemployment and self-employment, multiple states, and now  
small business filing.  It remembers past year items (e.g., who you  
worked for, what kinds of items you filed) to expedite current year  
filings, shows a comparison of past and current year to sanity check  
your returns are in the right ballpark, and automatically applies  
amortized items from past years on the current return.  It takes me  
about a week to do my taxes, which I figure is about half the time  
it'd take to do it by hand, and with far fewer opportunities for error.

State taxes are as easy.  Once you're done with the federal returns,  
it's a handful of questions and the state returns are ready to go.

I need the high-end deluxe version for home rentals and small business  
filings, so I end up paying a bit over a hundred dollars a year to  
file everything.  In my opinion that's very inexpensive for the amount  
of complexity I have.  I seem to recall the lowest end is free, at  
least for Federal returns.

The first couple years, I did it by hand and online to compare the two  
and so I knew what it was doing.  For the last several years, I've  
done it strictly online.

One industry-wide downside of using tax software is a lack of an  
interchange format.  I don't know what I'd do if I had to move to  
another software solution.  I'm not sure an export would capture  
everything such that it could be re-imported somewhere.

jf

On Mar 7, 2010, at 11:01 AM, Varol Okan wrote:

> Okay, I don't want to start a VI ves EMACS discussion here but the  
> last
> few years I used HR block to do our taxes. But I don't want to cough  
> up
> $600 for a simple tax return anymore. So I am considering the HR block
> SW, or Turbo tax and I am interested in which one is better.
>
> I don't have any complex things going on, so the basic version ( or
> maybe the home office version ) should do just fine.
>
> Also any idea on which one can be used through wine ( or natively ) in
> Linux ?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Varol
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-- 
John Franklin
franklin at elfie.org
ICBM: 39º 01' 58.4"N 77º 24' 49.6"W Z+84m

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