It's that time of year again and it's time to break out my Turbo Tax rants.
I used Turbo Tax for a years. My parents bought Turbo Tax in a cardboard box every year when I was growing up, and I have memories of filing my taxes for the first time after getting a summer job. We had a Performa. I kept asking my mom about the process, and double checking the figures from my W2 (I'm still sometimes afraid, for no rational reason, that I'm Doing My Taxes Wrong).
I basically used Turbo Tax every after that. For more than a decade. I'm a creature of habit, I fear change, and I'm willing to pay a bit extra for the promise of easily importing last year's files to make things quicker.
In 2017 the bait-and-switch pricing and lobbying to keep taxes complex finally drove me off. I waited far longer than I should have.
That year I started working through Turbo Tax, as I had been. I had sold some stocks, basically for the first time, and watching the preparation price creep up from "free" to "Delux" to "Fuck you, you need Premier" I just couldn't do it. The price didn't even include state filing fees.
I was pissed. The lobbying thing has stuck in my craw, and this finally got me off my butt. I abandon my finished (but unpaid) preperation and started over with TaxAct, which I also used in 2019.
I have less of a problem with TaxAct; at least they make you pick your price-point up front.
Last year I switched to FreeTaxUSA. The domain name has a slightly scammy feel, but other than that I can't complain. They imported my TaxAct PDF filing, so initial data entry was no problem. The GUI makes more sense to me than either TurboTax or TaxAct (which is more or less a TurboTax clone). FreeTaxUSA's GUI is also much more responsive. I think the online documentation is also better – it is generally succinct and actionable rather than a lengthy summary of related tax rules which I am left to interpret. Federal filing is no-cost, and state filing is cheap. They do push a paid Support and Audit Assist option (the "deluxe" package), which is also cheap. I don't think it adds much value, but I bought last year and probably will buy it again because I want them to be around next year too.
It's just better. It's also cheaper. They also, as far as I know, don't lobby to keep tax laws complex.