Comment by vel0city
7 months ago
10-15 hours? Turbo Tax usually costs me like $50 or so after discounts through my bank and I can nail out my taxes in under an hour with all it can auto-import in my situations. If it saves me 14 hours of labor its definitely worth $50 to me, and I'd say I'm massively overpaying compared to the free filing tools out there!
It shouldn't be this hard.
The cost of Turbo Tax is not the just what you pay for the service. The real cost is that they now have a very detailed financial picture of you and your family and they will market that to any willing buyer (I will never be convinced that they don't do this).
Their privacy policy directly states they don't sell user data.
https://ttlc.intuit.com/turbotax-support/en-us/help-article/...
But even then, assuming "they'll just sell it anyways", most of that information exists with other orgs anyways that could just as easily just sell it anyways. If I don't trust Intuit, why would I trust ADP or whoever my bank is to not sell my data either?
But sure, I agree, using any third party to file your taxes exposes you to that risk of yet another party potentially leaking/selling data. Once again though, to me that trade off of 14 more hours with my kids versus someone knowing what I paid in mortgage interest last year is pretty OK to me. Data brokers could just glean that same kind of useful information it means through the thousands of other things tracking me anyways.
> Their privacy policy directly states they don't sell user data.
unless you happen to click "OK" on one of the deceptive prompts TurboTax will show you while preparing your taxes.
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I always wondered if “we won’t sell your data” means literally just that. They promise they won’t sell it but, what’s stopping them from giving it away for free? Moreover, they could establish another company, give them data for free, and that second company sells it.
I regret to inform you that your bank, credit card company and every other financial institution you use is already selling it off in real time... it's how they make credit reports :(
I know, but I still resist where I can.
Also my bank only knows what goes on in my checking account. They have a lot less information than the IRS does (although what they do have is probably a lot more detailed).
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I guess enough time has passed.
I used to work in Intuit's Security R&D business unit and worked on the software that made it so that even if someone at Intuit/Turbo Tax wanted to do that it'd be impossible. Intuit spends a lot of money on cryptographers and very skilled programmers to ensure that. The definition of PII extends all the way to the HTTP logs of filers such that we couldn't even visualize filings on a map as they came in during tax season.
There's plenty of things that Intuit does that aren't good without alleging baseless claims.
your bank, credit card, even local supermarket...etc. already have your info. its 2025. there's really nowhere to hide.
This is one of the big reasons I keep doing it manually. Only the IRS and my state gets my info.
And your bank, and your credit card company, and the company handling payroll, and your health insurance company, and credit bureaus, and and and and...
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and Elon musk, apparently
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What is the cost of that to me?
The cost of giving money to Intuit is that they then give it to politicians to create a more convoluted tax return so that you are further locked into giving Intuit money every year.
I realize you're just repeating frequently reported information, and Intuit has indeed lobbied against the IRS creating a free competitor to their product. But Intuit has not lobbied to make taxes more complicated. Congress does that well enough on its own. If you reread the original ProPublica piece that kicked off all the Intuit-hate 6 years ago, you'll see they imply it but carefully don't actually say it or back it up; others quoting the article were less careful.
If you can get through turbotax in under an hour (and are able to use their $50 version!) you probably can do it by hand in under two. Hint: If nothing changed year-to-year, just look at last year’s tax return. It is probably a 1040-EZ, and all you have to do is copy this year’s numbers from whatever documents turbotax copied them from last year. Then, read the directions for the form and do the arithmetic.
At some point in a few years, this will stop working, and you’ll probably overpay by thousands.
Anyway, it took me well over three hours to use turbotax this year, which is faster than most. An hour of that was reverse-engineering their calculation error which made my refund too high, and certainly would have triggered a sternly worded demand for more money and a fine (or worse) from the IRS. I know this because they made another error a few years ago, and it cost me 16 hours on hold with the IRS and thousands of dollars.
Having said that, I’d have overpaid a few thousand this year and spent at least 8 hours doing it by hand.
On the bright side, if Trump succeeds in burning the federal government down, maybe a simpler tax code (like the rest of the first world has) will emerge from the ashes of the IRS. If not, then he won’t be president any more.
So, at least it’s not 100% bad.
Edit: I just noticed you’re using auto-import! If that’s saving you time, you’re making a big mistake. Intuit doesn’t reliably save all the documents you’ll need when the IRS sends you a nasty letter. Go manually download as many of them as you can, and file them for 7 years.
1040-EZ was discontinued in 2018. You just fill out 1040 now and leave lines blank. If you only have W2 income and don't make too much, it is really easy. You just fill out lines 1a, 12, 25a and the IRS will figure the rest (you can calculate the intermediate numbers if you want to, but they will do it for you).
However, knowing it's that easy requires reading a lot of instructions, and if you make enough money (depending on filing status), it suddenly gets much more complicated (forms 8959, 8960, 6251 have income triggers), and if you have 1099s (INT or DIV) you might need to file Schedule B and form 8995. And if you have a mortgage, you should do your taxes twice to see if itemizing with Schedule A is better. And god forbid you sold anything and have to do Schedule D and forms 8949.
I do not understand you guys, I do not care about my taxes. They are fairly complex by Swedish Standards because I deliberately loose money In some area that gives me tax cuts, but not overly so.
Every year I get a digital form to sign from the tax office, I pay residual taxes and send it in all digital. This takes me in totalt 20 minutes including everything. Everything is prepared for me all I have to do is check if everything is correct. I can not fathom even copying those numbers correctly from diffrent sources in under an hour.
I do not want to do my taxes. I just want to be informed so I can double check and pay them.
Spending an hour doing taxes seems crazy ineffective .
I don’t care either. I’ve tried hiring people to do them for me, but it ended up being even more work.
The worst thing about our system is that the taxes are impossible to figure “correctly” (that’s not even a concept that makes sense, given how the tax code works) and there are massive legal penalties for getting them wrong.
> Turbo Tax usually costs me like $50
You may not have Rental income and Stocks to report
If paying for TurboTax works for you, that's great. If you find it worth the money, that's great. It's just not worth it for me and wanted to tell people there is another way.
I never said it is hard. Slow and tedious, but not hard. I take my time. I probably could speed it up, but I usually listen to music while I do it and try not to stress myself out about it.