this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Is it really that hard to do your own taxes? I was taught to do this in school and it's really not hard if all you have to do is write in how much money you made and then claim the standard deduction. If your taxes really are that messy then you can hire an accountant to do it, and they'll do it ten times better than any tax software could, because if the software could do it better then they'd bloody use the software.
Edit: was mostly referring to people who work a job and that's it, which is probably 80% of the population
Guess you don’t have stock sales.
I used a paid prepared once. They used a program and I had to teach THEM how to handle RSU income.
Took longer and cost 10x as just doing it myself in FreeTaxUSA.
Or God forbid a wash sale.
I tried my hand at trading options once (don't do it kids) and ended up needing to mail 100 pages to the IRS (snail mail, like in an envelope)
That was my experience using robo advisors too, like betterment. I had so many buy and sells I had to mail my return in on paper, it sucked.
Yes. My taxes are insanely complicated. I do not have the attention to detail or time to do it myself.
Tax accountant wants 1800 to do it and I've had multiple people fuck it up before.
turbo tax wants 150. It takes me less than two hours. It's only been fucked up once due to an rsu maturing in a different state and clicking us over into a different qualification for dual state income
Also with our income we don't qualify for free
It has its place as a tax software and since it works I see no reason to spend time looking for a new one
TT has twice tried to massively overtax me because of bugs in RSU and mortgage calculations.
FreeTaxUSA for me.
Have a high yield savings account? Have an investment account? A house with a mortgage? Finding somebody that has none of those is much more rare than somebody who has one of those.
And now you've got: Your standard 1040. Your W-2. Schedule A to deduct the house mortgage, property taxes, etc. Schedule B to report your interest and dividends. Schedule D for capital gains and losses (which still frequently come up even if you didn't make any transactions all year). 1099-INT from your savings account. 1099-DIV from your investment account.
And that's just the super super common stuff that tens of millions of Americans are filling out each year. There's still more and more byzantine steps for other common cases that aren't quite as common as the ones I've listed above. Have split custody of a child? You're going to be reading and reading through multiple pages of instructions to determine 1) if you can claim them as a dependent 2) if you can claim them for the child tax credit 3) if you can claim them for EITC.
And that's not even getting into the number of places where the instructions are basically to fill out long sections of forms two different ways and then only use one of the two based on the final number. All the work and effort for the other one just gets thrown away. But they can't just tell you which way to do it up front because there's no way to know until you get that final number both ways.
I was definitely intimidated at first, but after taking a peek at FreeTaxUSA I realized that it's literally filling out a form based off documents that you received so I've become more accustomed to it. It's definitely not something my cohort was taught in school.
Imo, no, and that's with selling stocks and such. As long as you know what box goes where it's really not too bad, just time-consuming at times. I use FreeTaxUSA for state and federal, and I think it's worth it. I feel like the whole "taxes are incredibly difficult" apply if there are a lot of edge cases surrounding deductions and the like, but to your point if you're doing standard deductions you can definitely do them on your own.
Do you do a backdoor Roth IRA? Between that and stock sales, last time I tried freetaxusa it wasn't possible.
No, standard taxes are easy. Doing them online is the hard part.
Then do them on paper?? Do people really like pretending that writing things on a piece of paper or editing & printing a PDF and then mailing it in is difficult?
I fail to see why you have an issue here. It's stupid easy and the government has all the info it needs for most people. Why advocate for wasted time just because it's wasted time on an easy task. I don't care that it's easy. I care that it is wasteful.
It’s not a case of difficulty so much as it’s a case of a more rapid refund. When you mail in your return it can take up to 2 months to get your return, if you have one coming, where the online services such as TT & FreetaxUSA can get it directly in the it’s computer allowing for a more rapid refund
Yes, that is inconvenient and slow and therefore not as easy or as quick as doing them online.