donheff
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After going through the upgrade confusion and refund from Turbo Tax this year I decided to run Tax Act in parallel to see which was easier/better for future use. Has anyone else tried this? If so did they output the same results and which did you prefer?
It feels like Tax Act is a little bit more transparent (easier to see all the categories, what is going into the forms, etc.) and better for avoiding upgrade come-ons. But, surprisingly my Federal return promises a $452 refund on TT and an $82 refund on TA. I assume I entered something differently but haven't been able to suss it out looking through all the summary screens in TA and TT. I will probably export PDFs of the 1040s and go through them line by line to see what is up but what a PITA.
My basic taxes are straightforward - retirement income from a Fed pension, interest, dividends, and CGs, simple itemized deductions. But things get complicated by a $30K "stipend" DW gets from her law firm. This is standard self employment income on a K-1 (even though she doesn't actually have to put in any hours to get it) so we have social security taxes and 6 state tax entries other than DC, our home state, (the firm files in all but CA we we have to file a return in addition to the DC return). I suspect that something may have gone wrong on the self employment side. In particular I was confused by some of the questions regarding health insurance and long term care. I ran into two input forms that asked me about it - one under DWs self employment and one under itimized medical deductions. Maybe I missed something and got a double entry for LTC in one of the apps.
The biggest problem for me is that a fair number of the questions concerning health insurance and income types in self employment are pretty opaque. This stuff should be easier to figure out. Can't wait for next year when I will have the sale of out weekend house to deal with.
It feels like Tax Act is a little bit more transparent (easier to see all the categories, what is going into the forms, etc.) and better for avoiding upgrade come-ons. But, surprisingly my Federal return promises a $452 refund on TT and an $82 refund on TA. I assume I entered something differently but haven't been able to suss it out looking through all the summary screens in TA and TT. I will probably export PDFs of the 1040s and go through them line by line to see what is up but what a PITA.
My basic taxes are straightforward - retirement income from a Fed pension, interest, dividends, and CGs, simple itemized deductions. But things get complicated by a $30K "stipend" DW gets from her law firm. This is standard self employment income on a K-1 (even though she doesn't actually have to put in any hours to get it) so we have social security taxes and 6 state tax entries other than DC, our home state, (the firm files in all but CA we we have to file a return in addition to the DC return). I suspect that something may have gone wrong on the self employment side. In particular I was confused by some of the questions regarding health insurance and long term care. I ran into two input forms that asked me about it - one under DWs self employment and one under itimized medical deductions. Maybe I missed something and got a double entry for LTC in one of the apps.
The biggest problem for me is that a fair number of the questions concerning health insurance and income types in self employment are pretty opaque. This stuff should be easier to figure out. Can't wait for next year when I will have the sale of out weekend house to deal with.