Huge upvote for freetaxusa. My wife was worried that it wouldn't be as good so we did our taxes one year on both services simultaneously. TurboTax's interface was so bad it took almost twice as long to complete the same work and the refund was the same.
Why would I pay for a worse interface? We don't have trivial taxes either, we have our own business and investment income. TurboTax was way worse about not letting us skip over stuff we don't have. It creates single question pages one after another instead of just sticking them in a list so you can skim through them all at once and select only the relevant ones.
In my case, Turbotax did a better job helping me figure out my taxes this year.
I tried freetaxusa but there were a few things that turbotax provided clearer guidance on. There was one particular issue where I was quite stumped with Freetaxusa, but Turbotax explained it.
I believe Turbotax also found one or two things that freetaxusa didn't point me towards. But it was all kind of a haze at this point so I might be misremembering.
I don't want TurboTax to be better, but for me it was better this year. I really hate their lobbying. I'll give try more options next year.
I would love to use one of the free products. Unfortunately, for me, TurboTax is the only one I've tried that will import all of my brokerages... Seems small price to pay.
And they always get me with the "Audit defense"... I am not sure how useful it will be if I ever get audited (I err on the side of caution when doing taxes), but still some small extra amount of money for extra peace of mind...
Since I'm not a tax professional at this time, I can tell you that your odds of being audited are somewhat random and usually very low unless your filing is off by a certain percentage in some fields/parameters. Lower income folks are more likely to be audited. The audit "defense" just means you'll get x hours of professional time if you were audited to represent you during an audit. On the whole, the odds of being audited are usually so small it's usually just free money for Intuit.
> TurboTax is the only one I've tried that will import all of my brokerages
That's trivial; don't throw your ranch so easily. You only have to copy few fields from your 1099 form and the instructions are very clear - which fields to copy and paste where.
Why would I pay for a worse interface? We don't have trivial taxes either, we have our own business and investment income. TurboTax was way worse about not letting us skip over stuff we don't have. It creates single question pages one after another instead of just sticking them in a list so you can skim through them all at once and select only the relevant ones.