My CPA once saved me several thousand dollars so I figure that’s many years of fees for me to not do the shit.
I've always used TurboTax (except for one year where I bought my place + moved states and traveled a bunch for work and went to a random H&R Block person) because $300 is ultimately nothing. But I'm going to try FreetaxUSA this year as reddit says it's... free. It's really crazy that the IRS doesn't have a better/free tool. I'm just going to assume that's because of lobbying efforts and be upset about it.
Accurate. TurboTax was almost successful in abolishing public efile too (or something like that). Don’t remember specifics, but they lobbied for and almost revived a monopoly on efiling
first year having to file the nondeductible IRA contribution form and it requires a higher paid version of turbo tax THIS IS BULLSHIT
I always fight the urge to cheat my taxes.... not by a lot, just a couple thousand. That way if I get caught I just pay it back plus the interest or whatever they may charge. This is because I never get anything back and I see how much I pay and it makes me sick. I think the chances of getting caught are extremely low. It's like, a casino, except you have the house odds. But then I turn into a huge puss and don't.
yeah i mean it's an extra like $150 for me. really not that big of a deal. and i have done Turbo Tax for years and it takes a heck of a lot longer than 15 minutes.
Credit Karma is actually free. They have some things that are not supported (jorge has told me he can't do city returns) but I think for most people who are only doing federal and a state or two it should work.
Nothing wrong with a little surprise bonus, IMO. What would you guys suggest as someone that is heavily bonus compensated do? I currently deduct more throughout the year because I generally don't need all of that money at that time and I don't want to owe when it comes to tax season. Just so happens that the last couple of years I've paid a lot more than I needed to over the course of the year, which shows in giant returns.
nah. last year I owed three grand, I'd rather have a refund than $30 in interest I could've earned. that said, I will adjust my withholdings to try and get it under a grand for 2020.
Having a non-stable paycheck would make this a pain in the ass. I would imagine by now you have the ability to guesstimate your yearly income; you can look up your tax liability based off that and constantly adjust your withholdings.
i moved everything to credit karma and my state refund went down $200 from turbotax then credit karma crashed when I tried to figure out why
H&R Block is free and worked for me. Same amount as what I would have gotten if I had done it through turbo tax
Can't speak much to the state thing, but I will say one of my few complaints about credit karma is that in the past, some of the input screens were not as intuitive as I'd like to see for people that are not tax professionals. I remember having an issue getting my HSA form 8889 to populate correctly; took me a while to find a box I needed to check that was not very clear and it corrected the issue. I could see your issue being something similar, ie it is including some investment income/excluding a deduction (or something similar) from the state return because of an unchecked box
Give me the float to work with. 9k average year and this year with the market being up 20%? Or used it earlier in the year on mid year hookers. Tax season hookers are always used up. Just take the average of your total liability over the last three years and write the number down. If nothing changes as the year goes on with where you are ending up, target paying that amount and do the math with the amount withheld. Taxes don’t change year over year unless you make some kind of wild life change. If you get paid more, apply 25%/35% to the additional amount depending on the bracket you are in. 1-5k isn’t going to kill you, but 10-20k a year over a lifetime is just giving money away out of laziness. Hell it is even substantial if you put more towards your mortgage earlier every year like you said you did anyway. You probably gave away 2k this year by not investing it the market. Over 10 years if you did that ever year and didn’t take the snowball of compounded interest you’re giving up 30k+ in every decade in modern history. Mortgage math would be 15k probably over 10 years if you don’t have a huge mortgage with the mortgage interest law change. Get the snowball going. One year isn’t going to be life changing. 10 years is going to be a nice chunk of change.
I appreciate the input. I’m meeting with my accountant at the end of March and I’ll talk to him about it. By my math I overpaid by 16k last year before factoring in any deductions.
$18k is probably too much but I’d much rather loan the government $3-5k and get that back than be surprised by having a payment due. $3k between 26 paychecks is nothing and it would just disappear into the day to day budget if I pocketed it. I’d rather have the $3k in lump to pay off something at the beginning of the year.