Finally, I Got 'er Done!

I commend you for the endeavor but to help you celebrate I drank a 7UP. If you chose to not drink beer I thought I would do the same.

No biggie, standard deduction. It's funny how everyone I know has to go to their accountant.

It's like Seinfeld. I have really been trying to understand why these folks who have MBAs and pretty bright go to someone and pay them $700 to do their taxes. Why would I want to pay someone $700? (the refund, it's on purpose it's forced savings that I use to pay the annual school taxes, the IRS can collect the interest I'm ok with it)

I think I finally figured it out. They all have fictitious LLCs and are declaring losses, really. It's as if having someone else sign off there is a perceived forcefield against an audit.

Someone finally spilled the beans lol If the IRS had the resources they would close the loopholes

Use Turbo Tax. Takes about an hour for both the Feds and the State taxes. Costs me $45 bucks at Costco and I do mine and a couple of grandkids taxes. I used to do the kids but they pay professionals to do their’s now.

Hey, according to Jimmy Buffett it's five o'clock somewhere!

Phil

I used H&R Block, and it only took me an hour. The refunds (Fed + state) have already arrived and have been spent.

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it's the dog's fault

Only took 2 1/2 beers. Refund gets smaller and smaller and went up into another bracket.

It is simply astounding how I didn't sell anything, have no schedule D, yet the Commonwealth of PA is able to tax capital gains distributions from mutual funds, as ordinary income. I guess if I paid an accountant $700 to do it for me, I wouldn't know and yes, ignorance is bliss lol

I use Taxact. Of course after I efiled in February, my wife gave me a list of companies that offer free efiling software. Maybe I will try those next year.

Got it done 3 weeks ago. Paid the turbo tax $25 fee to file the state ver electronically. The usps is so messed up around here, truly unsafe to mail stuff any more.

Not yet for me, but I'm almost there and owe so was waiting a bit longer. Will finish up and pay this week.

reason to rush and pay, given savings is now 3.5%+ (yes refunds have a much higher opportunity cost but I consider it forced savings AND if everything is declared properly that's how it goes).

I saw an estimated 90% of folks take the standard deduction, so it's astounding that many pay $500+ to their "accountant" to do it. These guys should have experienced the Midas and Aamco transmission effects, i.e. services no longer needed in a significant way. But I hear no.

Our relatives at a St Patty's party complained "that guy" charged $580 last year and now wants $700, too greedy hahahahahaha

I used that as an opportunity to ask why you're not doing it yourself (wife MBA and husband software engineer, they can easily launch turbo tax like the rest of us haha)

I always have to ask for an extension due to late-arriving documentation!

I used to slog through my 1040 and take all the deductions possible and stay legal. It seems the standard deduction now beats how I used to do it. Don't know if that's because of new tax rules or I just got old and retired.
Now I use TurboTax. I have Vanguard and other financial institutions download my data direct into TurboTax. Everything is placed in correct place, correct forms, and correct math. Take the standard deduction and I am done.
Kids still have more complicated returns and actually pay people to do their taxes. I ask them to try TurboTax and compare to their accountants, but they defer and say no. Oh well.
I am at the point in retirement that when I do a possible audit check at the end of doing TurboTax, I get about a 1% chance of being audited.
Only downside I see is that Roth IRA's were not available to me when I was actively funding my IRA's. Now all my spendable income coming out of IRA as regular income. Plus it jams your Medicare payments up to astounding levels. Both my wife and I are paying more for our Medicare than we ever paid for medical when we were working and on employers plans.

Had a ton of itemized deductions this year. Had to use an accountant to get through all of it. That fee is the added pain on top of what I owed to FED. Ugh...

Well done

Think of that as sort of a forced donation. You are helping fund Medicare for the people whose fees come nowhere near meeting their average impact.

Great!

A retired relative has income of social security, a small pension, some interest dividends. There's some other small tidbits but a very quick and simple return.

The tax person used to charge $125, then $150, and last few years wanted $250.

We did the return in turbotax in about 45 minutes. Done!

Yeah, finished mine last week - celebrated with HARD liquor. After all, it was a HARD job! ...... and it took longer than 4 hours.

Started using it when it was on a floppy disk. Have paid a few times for state e-filing but worth it. All ways received a refund from Federal in two weeks but have had to wait on Utah most every year.

I still do my own but go through such anxiety and procrastination that I keep thinking that next year I will go to someone to do my taxes to avoid feeling so bad. however, the worst part is getting all of the doucments together and you still have to do that with an accountant. I also think the accountant will get a better result b/c they know the laws better.

It seems like eons ago but I also remember the TurboTax floppy disks. I was wondering if this old fossil might be for sale as a memorabilia item and a Google search found 1992 TurboTax 3.5" & 5-1/4" disks for sale on eBay for $10. Quick, grab them before they are gone. NOTTT!!!!

Link: https://www.ebay.com/itm/193831601606

I go back pretty far on TurboTax. I remember that in the first year or two after I started using it there was a massive user interface change. I think that somehow was associated with the recent purchase of them by Intuit resulting in something more Intuit-like, but somehow I seem to recall it was specifically a changeover to running under Windows.

The almighty Internet asserts that Intuit bought TurboTax in 1993, so I guess my first use was right around then, somewhere.

Back in the early 90's before the Intuit purchase of TurboTax, one of TurboTax's main competitors was Personal Tax Edge, which was developed by Parsons Technology in Cedar Rapids, IA. After purchasing TurboTax, Intuit quickly bought out Parsons Technology in 1994. At the time, it was rumored that Intuit's primary interest in Parsons Technology company was to own the Personal Tax Edge software and kill it to eliminate the competition with TurboTax. Whether or not that was their motive, it is exactly what Intuit did with the Parsons software. A few years later, some of the original developers of Personal Tax Edge started a new company called 2nd Story Software and developed a personal tax product called TaxAct. That company and software has since been bought out one or more times, but TaxAct remains an actively marketed and maintained product.

And as a side note, Bob Parsons who started Parsons Technology moved to AZ after the Intuit buyout and started a new company ... GoDaddy.

I have a personal connection to this history because I live in the Cedar Rapids metro area and my son-in-law was working for Parsons Technology at the time of the Intuit takeover. My daughter also briefly worked for 2nd Story Software.

In the '90s my employer, MCI, bought two different software companies in Cedar Rapids. They were genuinely inventive and I was sent out to learn how (in one case) their stuff worked. Well,,, the employees were feeling sensibly insecure. I'd been chosen because I had fewer sharp edges than some others. Not surprisingly when I returned to Colorado and was asked how does their stuff work all I could say was "very well". My other memory from the time was that (apparently on alternate weeks) the town smelled like Cocoa Puffs.

Back to Ttax. In that era at MCI the baby computer people (we now call them servers) all wanted everyone to whisper X-Windows and think Ttax. Ttax was the human interface that was their model.

What use would this be to anyone? Time travel??

that I use Turbo Tax because of my dad, and I actually have no clue for how long. I probably can only check computers back to 2001 to see if they have a tax return. Clearly I can go back to 2008 or so, but that's not "that" long in the big picture. My dad likely used floppies, my 2001 pc has a floppy drive.

I filed an amended return for 2013 in 2016, Turbo Tax to the rescue! Stupidly my son was born in Dec and I thought he had to be alive for the entire year to get the tax credit lol

the IRS paid me the tax credit plus interest. My mistake, and they pay interest. go figure...

I wonder how many people still use computers that have floppy disk drives. When I was in college my Radio Shack Tandy 1000 did not have a hard drive. I had to shell out $500 for a 20 meg hard drive. What a rip off that was looking back.

My recollection of Cedar Rapids is that it always smelled like molasses and oatmeal due to the presence of Penick & Ford and Quaker Oats!
Mark

I started my DIY tax prep habit upon choosing TaxCut (also back in the floppy disk era). Once H&R Block took them over, I switched to TurboTax and never looked back...

We had an extra day this year.

my eFile last Sunday, 4/16/23 maybe 9 PM EDT.

Checked this AM and where's my refund says it will be deposited on 4/25/23.

That's efficient imho.

Standard deduction, what's there to really analyze?

In 2022, I did buy, but sold no stocks etc. It absolutely kills me that by merely owning mutual funds, thousands upon thousands are generated as capital gains distributions, and the state taxes those as ordinary income. When's that gonna be fixed? lol

I love how my buddy says the IRS is a money grab and they on purpose delay returns. I don't see how if they approve a refund in 4 days, how they are delaying. I also don't see the money grab when I made an amended return in 2016, because I made an error on the child tax refund in 2013, and they pay me in 2016 with interest, how they grab money hahahaha

My accountant was apparently sick this year and I didn't know it (cancer). He managed to get through a complicated tax prep for me and then a week later (Ironically on tax day), he passed away. He was such a nice guy and now I'm going to his memorial this week. Really depressing...