this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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Mine was too complicated to file for free because I have retirement investments? Seems like a silly reason to force someone to use a paid service.
Same. It sucks having to pay H&R Block $300/year to file my taxes, but their online records save my ass every time I buy a house. I sincerely hope we see a more robust free file system in my lifetime.
$300? Just use Free Tax USA. It's free for federal and $15 for each state. No, you don't need extra stuff, unless you think you'll be audited.
If you spend a little time figuring out your tax situation, you don't need to pay someone else to do it. Here's a secret: the people they have doing your taxes don't necessarily have a master's degree in tax. Those people are helping corporations or wealthy people with trusts.
You missed the point of my reply. I pointed out that the benefit of H&R block is that they keep the records easily accessible, so when I buy a home I just link the H&R block account to the lender and they pull all of my tax and income history. Saves countless hours of gathering info and filling out paperwork. That's worth $300/year to me.
You wanna pay and extra ~$280 a year because you save a little bit of time when you buy a house? You know FreeTaxUSA has all your documents too, right?
You've never bought a house if you think it's saving "a little bit" of time. We're talking easily 40 hours of gathering and filing paperwork here. That's $2,200 of my time. If I buy a house once every 7 years it works out.
I've bought two houses and it did not take me 40 hours of gathering paperwork. Maybe an hour or so maximum to get my paperwork for the bank.
Do you buy houses all the time? Do you want your income info to be sold to anyone who will pay? You are paying extra for them to have access to your info.
I buy a house on average once every 3 years and it saves me apx $2,200 worth of time.