I started to do my taxes but was stymied by lack of one document, so here I am. I want to report that it was very, very difficult to buy the basic TurboTax program that I’ve started using to prepare taxes. Intuit really, really wanted me to use the alternative that would have a human being help me in some way (I’m sure not very much help for like $70 over the price of their base product). But, fuck ’em, I was able to find their base $70 (plus $20 to e-file in New York) product.
The catch-22 that Republicans love is, on the one hand, keeping tax forms complex because their tax-filing-software donor class wants that, while blocking and stymying the free e-file option (which Musk wanted to kill but didn’t get done, yet).
The other thing about taxes that isn’t much discussed is that most small business people cheat on them in some way or other. These people, who are predominantly Republicans and generally resentful of “welfare queens” or whatever other bullshit is being stirred up about the undeserving poors, often work pretty hard to avoid paying taxes. Charging personal stuff to business accounts, having a spouse on the payroll who doesn’t do anything, and a hundred other cheats are common practice. I’m technically a “small businessman” and when I had an accountant, she used to laugh at my mileage reports and deductions, because they would be for tiny amounts that I could have inflated with basically zero risk.
I guess we all know this, but Musk is kind of the culmination of the long-term hatred of taxes that has occupied the Republican Party since basically the beginning of the income tax system. I’m guessing most of the small businessmen are happy to see what he’s doing, well, until the face-eating leopards come for them.
Baud
Ain’t nothing small about you.
Rose Judson
As a self-employed person, I also get pointed questions from my US tax prep lady about whether I might have spent money on anything that could possibly be used as a deduction. I am sometimes tempted to declare all the books I buy in a year as expenses, but I’ve got two countries breathing down my neck and one income, so I play by the rules.
raven
My bride has been working on ours all day. The Airbnb is her thing so she gets to do the taxes.
Mousebumples
My husband has been using FreeTaxUSA.com to do ours the past few years, I think without issues. And we have a mortgage, 2 incomes, and investments. Already $$ spent for mistermix, but might help someone else.
I’ve been busy joining the Data Team for my local WisDems office, and I’m hoping to do more postcards for April SCOWIS race this weekend…
Mart
I did some part time work after retiring. The boss said I should pay no taxes, and if I have any questions give him a call and he would show me how to escape them. The work sucked and not enough earned before quitting to worry about, but yea, the never pay your fair share of taxes mind set is there.
Ohio Mom
Public service announcement: if you are over 50, AARP will do your taxes for you for free. They focus on low to moderate income people, though if you have enough income and complicated taxes, you would probably already have an accountant.
https://www.aarp.org/money/taxes/aarp-taxaide/
They are very well trained.
Melancholy Jaques
Add to that the widespread belief among white people that the taxes they pay are mostly used for foreign aid & free money & stuff for black people.
NeenerNeener
According to Leona Helmsley: “We don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes.”
Which reminds me, I’m one of those little people and I haven’t done my taxes yet.
Jay
https://nitter.poast.org/Gerashchenko_en/status/1890857643868074017#m
https://nitter.poast.org/MalcontentmentT/status/1890712839419256879#m
https://nitter.poast.org/ChrisO_wiki/status/1890526838507667514#m
Suzanne
I work for a large firm that is a federal contractor. So I have to take all the federal ethics and compliance training annually. This is all in addition to my license and those professional ethics requirements, and the fact that we work in educational and healthcare settings, so there’s fingerprinting and vaccine requirements and background checks, etc etc etc. Cheating on my taxes wouldn’t just be dishonesty and bad citizenship. It would endanger my career. So I take this shit seriously, and hire a good preparer.
I am beyond resentful — almost at contemptuous — of those “small business owners” and “entrepreneurs” who hold themselves up as beacons of good capitalism, but who cheat on their taxes. Seriously. I’m probably dumb for being truthful. I don’t even take the home office deduction, because my books and Peloton are in there.
AM in NC
I was a small business owner (employed around 50 people in a small chain of organic garden centers) until I sold and retired early.
we got AMAZING tax breaks just for being business owners. It fucking burns me up that so many ‘small bidness owners’ cheat on their taxes.
i like a functioning government that creates the conditions in which we can engage in commerce. I’ll gladly pay to support that.
i hate fucking republicans.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Suzanne:
You’re not dumb, they’re just dishonest cheats
alquitti
Republicans don’t hate taxes. After all, the government needs income, so there’s money to give to people like Musk. What they hate is the idea that they should pay taxes; that’s what the rest of are for.
And all this melodrama about cutting government waste so the tax cuts can be funded? It’s all nonsense. “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” They’re doing what they’re doing because they want to inflict pain and remind us who’s in charge. Well, I’m a cat, not a dog, and I don’t need a master.
brendancalling
I used to put a lot of effort into doing my taxes correctly, but at some point it dawned on me that if I messed up, either way the IRS would correct it for me. I’d get a bill or a refund. So now I just do the most basic attempt, and let the experts at the IRS deal with it. That’s their JOB.
In light of the current unpleasantness, I’m thinking back to a recent post on blue sky by George “a lot of this is my fault “ Conway. “If a bunch of sociopaths are trying to dismantle the federal government from the inside, why should we pay taxes? And, if they succeed, who’s going to make us?”
Not that I’m advocating anything.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, … ITEP.org:
Something something crushing tax burden on hard working job-creating American businessmen.
Grr…
Best wishes,
Scott.
Julie
@Ohio Mom: Hello, just stepping out of lurking to say that I run an AARP Foundation Tax-Aide site, and no you don’t have to be over 50. Our contract with the IRS requires us to serve everyone. Having said that, some tax returns are “out of scope” for us, including returns owing net investment tax or AMT, returns with rental income and returns for people who have small businesses with employees, inventory, business use of the home, expenses over $50k or net losses.
Jay
@Suzanne:
Dollar wise, the Rich and Corporations are the biggest tax cheats out there.
Kay
I hire tax professionals. Worth every penny. We have a complicated return. I do file my youngest’s taxes myself because we claim him as a dependent so I feel.like I owe him. His taxes are W-2 and easy too.
We didn’t actually get a tax cut last time. My taxes didn’t go down under Trump. I wonder if any non billionaire did.
Phylllis
Yep. Both times mine were due to transposed numbers (thank you Strabismus and discalculia); and both times were corrected in my favor.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Another Scott:
If there’s a next time, there can be no “look forward, not back”
Another Scott
@Mart: Heh. :-/
J’s parents sold their home and moved in with us when they started having issues with normal life when they were in their 80s.
We were shocked to discover that they hadn’t been filing their income taxes for several years.
“Oh that. We’re too old to pay taxes.” !!! Fortunately, it was easy for us to file amended returns, etc., so it wasn’t a huge deal. (I’m sure the good folks at the IRS have seen it before.)
So, the mindset is out there, with “old” replaced by another word of their choice. :-/
(In the in-laws case, we think they were just overwhelmed and didn’t want to admit it.)
Best wishes,
Scott.
Kay
@Another Scott:
Its insane that they’re “the most valuable automaker in the world”
Sure they are.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
What do you think of Jim Tressel being our new Lt. Governor?
At this point, anyone who willingly joins the GOP is not a good person in my eyes.
Aside from LGBTQ+ Ohioans. He’s so full of shit
My county sheriff switched parties in 2023 to Republican and recently he said he wanted to do his part in helping the Trump Administration’s deportation efforts by housing undocumented immigrants in the county jail.
I see him every once in awhile at my workplace and I just want to walk up to him to ask him how he thinks history will judge him, citing his willingness to join an openly fascist party to keep his job and to work with the Trump regime on housing the undocumented in jails. If he were to come back with some bullshit about obeying the law, I’d come back with, “It was also illegal in Nazi Germany to hide undesirables from the state during the Holocaust. Just because something is “legal” doesn’t make it right, and I don’t trust Trump and his minions to respect these people’s human rights when they’ve already shown a total lack of regard for the law. Y’know that thing you claim to respect?”
hrprogressive
The entire tax code is just a shell game designed to benefit only those who already have money and screw over everyone else who doesn’t.
TBone
@brendancalling: I’ma get ’em done by financial advisor tax pro who electronically files my return in February, and then reminds me to snail mail the miniscule check on April 15. This year, I’m sending an extension request form first on April 15. The check money can earn interest in my bank account for a while. Financial advisor tax pro guy may have a conniption (or not). I think he might laugh with me.
BlueGuitarist
Iowa State House District 100 special election March 11:
Democrat Nannette Griffin, who owns an auto repair shop, is running. IA-H-100 is in Lee County, in Iowa’s southeastern corner, overlapped by IA-01, the closest US House seat won by a Republican last year.
State house district carried by Trump by 27 points; by the Republican US House candidate by 14.
In an Iowa state legislative special election a few weeks ago Democrat Mike Zimmer, a HS principal, flipped a Trump +21 district.
Nannette Griffin’s website: https://www.nannetteforiowa.com/
Includes ActBlue link.
More info: https://www.bleedingheartland.com/2025/02/10/nannette-griffin-is-running-for-iowa-house-district-100/
Writing more Wisconsin Supreme Court postcards this weekend.
Looking into postcarding for this Iowa special.
Suzanne
@Jay:
Don’t worry, I have plenty of contempt. Enough for everyone.
different-church-lady
@Another Scott: Guaran-fuckin-tee you until the republic falls any one of us individuals will, by at least an order of magnitude, be paying a higher percentage of our income in taxes than any corporation.
Nukular Biskits
You guys always have the great topics … when I don’t have time to participate.
A pox on all your houses! LOL!
Me & Ms. Biskits are going out for dinner tonight. Y’all be sweet.
different-church-lady
@Jay:
Here’s the thing: the corporations probably aren’t even cheating.
JaySinWA
@Mousebumples: I’ve been using FreeTaxUSA.com for the last couple of years as well. I have kicked in for the paid version after doing my taxes because it’s cheap and I would like to support them. Not the easiest of interfaces and everything is done online, so if that worries people it may not be for them.
I’m not sure how well they support self employment.
Kay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
My husband is horrified. But he’s generally horrified these days.
Its bad to say but I’ve emotionally left Ohio. Its just the way I am. I’m done with it. I hope to live in Michigan, Copenhagen and NY and spend time with our grandchildren. My middle son will still be in Toledo though but he travels for work so we only see him once a month anyway. I’m pretty sure my youngest is going to Wisconsin so if he has children I’ll have to add Wisconsin.
Redshift
It’s not just that — they hate anything that makes doing taxes easier, because they want people to hate it. Lots of the Republican base doesn’t actually pay much in taxes, so it would be harder to keep them resentful of it if all they had to do was review a postcard from the IRS and check off “yes, that looks right to me” (which our country could totally do for everyone whose taxes aren’t complex, and which many other countries do.)
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
Same here. Through 2021, it was pretty straightforward: salary, some interest income, pretty normal deductions, so I did them myself. In 2022 we had some beneficial family events with complicated tax consequences, and between that and changes due to retirement, we’ve paid the accountant that year and for 2023, and the accountant will be doing our 2024 return as well.
I figure we may be able to use our accountant-prepared 2024 return as a model for future years’ returns, just different amounts in the same lines on the 1040 and the assorted schedules. But OTOH, it’s been sweet to have that task off my desk and onto someone else’s. So I may just keep letting the accountant take care of it. We’ll see when tax time rolls around next year.
Redshift
Yeah, and they’ve made it extremely difficult to buy the download-and-install version instead of the online version. (No, Intuit, I don’t want all of my financial information on your servers.) I’ve always managed it, but my dad got sucked into the web version a couple of years ago, and didn’t realize it until he was done and there was no way for him print the things he always keeps for his records.
John S.
@Kay:
My family and I left everything and everyone we ever knew in South Florida 3 years ago because we had enough of the bullshit there. We couldn’t be happier living in Washington state, and none of us are ever looking back.
When it’s time to go, it’s time to go.
Suzanne
@John S.:
Yes.
This is why I get reeeeeeal tired of rich people in blue states, who are obviously there because they don’t want to deal with MAGA bullshit, guilt-tripping liberals in redder places for “not standing up to their Trumpy relatives” or some shit. Like, everyone is doing the best they can do, and they also want to be in bluer places! It’s a thing that takes time and money!
Ella in New Mexico
FYI “welfare queens” is out and “Parasite Class” is the new disparaging term for folks who aren’t rich tax cheats.
KenK
We use FreetaxUSA. We filed a week ago. Oddly, we have not received a copy of SocSec benefits. I had to go online and download the statements. 🤷🏻♂️
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
I don’t blame you at all for feeling that way. The anti-gerrymandering ballot initiative failing last year was a gut punch. And I thought the abortion amendment and marijuana legalization ballot initiative handily passing in 2023 meant Ohio was potentially on a better path. Fuck me, I guess
@Suzanne:
It’s easy for them to say. It’s pretty fucked up when your own relatives will believe what Trump, some politician, FB, or Fox say over you
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Ella in New Mexico:
That’s Elon trying to appropriate a Breadtube/left wing term. He’s the top parasite of the parasite class, the 1%
I want to know what the people who think billionaires like Musk have their best interests in mind are smoking
Kay
@John S.:
Oh that’s so nice, that you went thru with it. I have disreputable relatives I have to take care of so I’ll be around and about in Ohio, but I’m done living there.
My daughter has two girls. She’s never coming back here.
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Their thinking is that billionaires will help them preserve their place in the social hierarchy.
Glory b
I read that (mostly successful) small business owners were over represented in the January 6th insurrection crowd.
Media wondered why so many middle America success stories were so angry.
trollhattan
You’re all as surprised as I am.
Nukular Biskits
Actually, while waiting for Ms. Biskits to get ready, thought I’d pose this question:
Is refusing to pay taxes an act of civil disobedience or a crime?
trollhattan
How many ways are there to say “Because they don’t want fucking ginormous and stupid pickup trucks!”
We don’t really have “car companies” in the US, per se.
Sister Golden Bear
Why it’s as if “but the poor misguided children” was just a ruse, and they don’t want any of us to exist.
States move to restrict transgender adult care
I’ll note that Florida has already made it effectively impossible for any trans person, child or adult, to get trans healthcare. And Texas has already tried investigating doctors in states where trans healthcare is legal to prosecute them for treating Texas trans people who went out of state to seek treatment.
tam1MI
My taxes went up.
Ohio Mom
@brendancalling: Even math whiz Ohio Dad messed up his addition on our taxes once — he misread his own little, scrawly handwriting when doing the calculations.
Exactly what you said would happen, happened. The IRS wrote him and said, Nope, he said, Oops, resubmitted corrected numbers, there were no hard feelings.
Suzanne
@trollhattan: American cars are, broadly speaking, unattractive (to me but also many other design snobs). They often look disproportionate and unrefined, like a rolling McMansion.
Jay
@Sister Golden Bear:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c391grm0g3no
tam1MI
There is such a thing as literally being too poor to move.
MagdaInBlack
@Suzanne: Rolling Land Barge.
Suzanne
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Yeah. And, I will note, the people I know who have gone through this have usually worked on their friends and family for years. They might get to a point where they decide to stop bashing their heads against the wall, but I have never known it to be for lack of trying.
Genuine persuasion is a really difficult thing.
Another Scott
@BlueGuitarist: Thanks for the pointer to the Griffin race.
Donated.
Forward!!
Best wishes,
Scott.
Suzanne
@MagdaInBlack: “All their taste is in their mouth.”
zhena gogolia
@trollhattan: “find cost savings,” bull shit
Ohio Mom
@KenK: Our Social Security benefits tax report is also MIA. Hmmm…how paranoid to be…
@trollhattan: No, we don’t, we have truck companies. I’m old enough to remember when U.S. car companies were losing market share to small Japanese cars, so they changed tacks and started making smaller lines. That’s a quaint story now.
Kelly
@Mousebumples: We’ve also used FreeTaxUSA.com for several years. Ours have been really simple, not itemizing just standard deduction. A minor fiddle for Obamacare subsidy and HSA.
This year we’re having our taxes done. Mom passed away this year. We’re claiming her as a dependant and deducting the money we spent on her care. Remarkable amount of paperwork last year to care for her after dementia set in. I’ve absolutely had it with paperwork .
Spanky
@Nukular Biskits: Probably both, but the situation does beg the question: Is it really a crime if no one is there to notice?
trollhattan
@tam1MI:
Same. A lot.
trollhattan
@zhena gogolia:
Bet there are #s showing an understaffed IRS slashes US tax revenues. “We’re growing the deficit happier!”
Paul W.
@mistermix.bsky.social you need to switch to Tax Slayer, it’s really easy to just buy it for the year and they are apparently not responsible for lobbying to keep this all an unholy mess. Also, I have never done my own taxes for before but got through all of their setup easy peasy (and with live help for <$80 to file with NY as well)! I have several complicating factors too, so it wasn’t just putting in W2s and leaving it at that (wife freelances, I have a small Airbnb income via an LLC, etc).
Highly recommend to you or anyone else trying to do their own taxes.
Spanky
One of our Social Security forms came in the mail, and I had to log in to retrieve the other one, so we’re batting 50% in this household.
I highly recommend retrieving all you can as soon as you can.
Ohio Mom
@brendancalling: Even math whiz Ohio Dad made a mistake on our taxes once, he misread his tiny, scrawly handwritten calculations. Just as you predict, the IRS wrote back, Nope, Ohio Dad said, Oops, sorry, here’s the corrected version.
That was that, no hard feelings in either side.
Sister Golden Bear
@Jay: I suspect it won’t be the last, now that the bigots are emboldened.
Rest In Power Sam Nordquist. 24 years of life was not nearly enough.
CW to Jay’s link: While few details of his murder are provided, police said ”“circumstances of the case were “beyond depraved” and “by far the worst” homicide investigation his office had undertaken.””
Suzanne
@tam1MI: I am actually a big supporter of moving liberals to blue places, for their prosperity, safety, and sanity. Like, no one should have to live in those places if they don’t want to.
But yes, it is absolutely possible to be too broke to move and too broke to live where you have rights, and that’s incredibly fucked up.
Wapiti
@Another Scott: (In the in-laws case, we think they were just overwhelmed and didn’t want to admit it.)
A few years back my dad told me over breakfast that he was going to have to ask the IRS for a second extension. It was late September. “Uh, Dad, there is no such thing as a second extension. Those taxes are due on October 15th.” I did run down some paperwork and get it to his accountant.
I did his taxes last year; they were easy. I’ll have his taxes done mid-March this year – waiting for one investment document.
Sister Golden Bear
@Suzanne: Related, all the (invariably white rich cis-het) liberals on social media advocating that blue folks should move to red states to help change the voting demographics never volunteer to do so themselves.
different-church-lady
@Jay: I hate to say this, but things are so bad that at first I got the idea they were arrested for disturbing the murderers.
different-church-lady
@tam1MI: Mine too. I was just thinking about that today. That year I did the math on the old forms and the new ones, so I know with certainty the fuckers cost me about $500.
trollhattan
@different-church-lady:
They also gamed the withholding tables to pad paychecks while assuring we would underwhithhold when tax time came around.
Living in California we got slammed by the SALT deduction ceiling. As intended.
Spanky
Speaking of madness, I got junkmail from WaPo touting this headline:
We’re in Bond villain territory, minus the intelligence.
Baud
@Spanky:
And the white cat.
frog
@Spanky:
It’s a process crime! ;)
John S.
@Suzanne:
Thanks for understanding!
I lived in Florida for 40 years. And for 39 of those 40 years, I loved it. As much as Betty Cracker loves Florida. Well, almost being a NY transplant and all. But I grew up there, made great friends there, met my wife there and raised a young family there. It was my home.
I traveled a lot for work. Like all over the world and across the US. And for 15 years after 300k miles, every time I got off the plane, I was happy to be home. Until one day when I got off the plane and I wasn’t.
Spanky
@Spanky: … Adam has much more upstairs on this latest tidbit of stupidity and cupidity.
NeenerNeener
Amen. I spent 6 years in Columbus, Ohio, but drove back to see my parents in Upstate NY every time I had at least 3 days off in a row. I told myself it was an adventure, until one day I realized I could have an equally high stress, dead-end job somewhere a lot closer to my family.
Phein64
@brendancalling: My graduate school housemate put it like this: Whatever you give this IRS is a first offer. If they accept it, all is good. If not, you pay the difference.
Phein64
My grad school housemate put it like this: Whatever you send the IRS is a first offer. If they accept it, great. If not, you pay the difference.
glc
There’s a product called TaxAct which is pretty much the same as TurboTax but may be less annoying. This article seems sound: https://www.moneycrashers.com/taxact-vs-turbotax/
My personal experience …
TurboTax drove me away many years ago and I’m reasonably happy with TaxAct. There’s one check box at the start that says you don’t want all their related offers (and marketing) and then at the end you say no thanks to audit support (and presumably yes to the additional state filing support, not included with federal). And again no thanks to the weird advanced refund offers and such. I imagine the real money for them is in the add-ons, but they seem to want to retain their customer base and keep a clean interface.
No particular traps, assuming one reads the text as one goes along. A couple of levels according to schedules needed. An external search engine is occasionally the best way to locate their relevant help pages if you have anything subtle. No AI yet … and I think they have the sense to keep it that way.
NotMax
@Suzanne
What if cars, theoretically resurrected Pontiac division.
;)
frosty
I’ll be getting TurboTax again, but like MM, the one without “assistance.” I tried FreeFile a year or so ago but somehow it couldn’t handle all my 1099s. I know TT is getting expensive, but it transfers all my data year to year, includes the state, and transfers the data into that too. Saves me time.
Tax prep anecdote. Many years back when buying a house, things got complicated so I hired my F-I-L’s accountant. He looked at my draft where I was writing off points and said: “You can’t do that, it’s a big red flag. If you want to pay that much less, here’s where you do it.” His philosophy: “Pay your fair share but not a penny more.”
Phein64
@frosty: I worked taxes for Block one tax season. [If you are an anthropologist, there is a dissertation there.] It was truly a season in hell. All I can tell you is, whatever you pay Block or Jackson-Hewitt, that is for a service you could easily perform yourself.
K-Mo
100% right about small businesses. Don’t sleep on the number small businesses that base their business models on exploiting low wage workers, either.
CItizen Dave
@glc: I’ve used Tax Act for many years and am happy with it. The price has gone up a fair bit, and every year I’d tell myself, find a cheaper option and do that, but inevitably I’d procrastinate, and knowing TaxAct will fill in all my info, etc., I’d end up using it again.
I appreciate the suggestions for the other ones in this thread–maybe this year :) .
comrade scotts agenda of rage
What would be ideal is that if every entitled white professional that moved to Denver in the last 10 years moved to the Dakotas, a) Denver would be a far better place, and b) the Dakotas would be blue, pale blue, but blue. We don’t need more self-professed “progressives” moving to “urban” areas, unless it’s an exurb. They wanna affect political change (they don’t), then go somewhere where small numbers can have massive impacts.
Oh yeah, those entitled whites coming here fled from places like a Dakota. Or some lily-white burb with “socially liberal/fiscally conservative” parents. They go back there when their kids reach school age because Gentrification Ends At The School House Door.
Kayla Rudbek
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: the problem is that there aren’t enough jobs there in e.g. the Dakotas to employ all the professionals (who probably moved to Minneapolis or Chicago from being raised in the Dakotas/Nebraska/etc). And then that displaces people from Minneapolis and Chicago into New York, DC, Los Angeles, etc.
Even rural Wisconsin was having trouble hanging onto attorneys twenty years ago, and if you have two attorneys in town, they both live in nice houses (as opposed to if you have only one attorney in town, he lives in a shack because of conflicts of interest, he can only work for half of the town).
As for moving to the Dakotas in particular, I will go pick on the patent attorneys and agents because they can do a lot of remote work; there are under 100 total patent attorneys and agents in North and South Dakota combined. That’s a little better than when I checked last time pre-pandemic; I think there might have been under 50 total at that time. And with the current administration trying to pull all the examiners back into the office, it may start making more sense for the IP law firms to start putting more people into their DC offices.
Pinkpuppy
I strongly recommend FreeTaxUsa. I’ve used for several years now and it handles stock sales, tax prepayments with an interface I find easier to use than TurboTax. The free tier includes preparing your federal and free e-file. For $15 it will prepare and e-file your state return as well. And the upsell is quite low key (one page near the start and one page before filing)
I personally pay $8 for their Deluxe service (priority support, unlimited amendments) but that is mostly just to support them.
But if you want to use Turbotax, I suggest only buying it from Intuit as a last resort. There are reputable companies that sell it cheaper: for example Costco and Amazon sell Deluxe for $56.
knally
Perhaps a new rallying call is needed “No representation without taxation”. If you don’t pay the taxes you owe you don’t get to vote or run for office.
TheQuietOne
We used Jackson Hewitt Online for our very simple tax return. We only have to deal with one W-2 from my work, my wife’s Social Security, and 1099s from our pensions and credit union. It’s only $25 for both Federal and Wisconsin. The interface is just OK, but it gets the job done. Forty-five minutes, and I was done.
SteverinoCT
I use H&R Block; once upon a time in-person, but when life became less complicated, the downloadable version. It charges for fed+state, and another $20 to efile state. Being stupid, I have paid to efile when I owed state, then came to my senses and mailed a check. But now CT has its own free online filing. Since CT uses the fed numbers with some extra deductions and stuff, I gave it a try. The difference between Block and the state’s online service was $1. There we go. I filed on Feb 1, a Saturday; fed accepted the next day and I got my state refund Feb 7, fed refund Feb 8.
BellyCat
Small business owner, here. Advice from accountant 30 years ago was: “You can be a pig, but don’t be a hog.” 😂
(Like MM, I was skeert of even makin’ bacon.) 🥓
BellyCat
ETA: “Hogs go to slaughter”