I stopped using TurboTax some years ago and switched to TaxAct as a less bad alternative. I didn’t believe them to be necessarily tons better than giving money to TurboTax, but I figured at least it wouldn’t just keep solidifying a market leader who was capturing a significant market based mostly around actively lobbying to keep it that way.
In the last two years I took a leap to CreditKarma’s tax offering. It is a bit basic and not quite as endlessly full featured, but it is simple, efficient, pretty quick and quite fast. It’s also entirely free. The first year I used it I ran my numbers in a competing product to check, I was self employed at the time, which meant my tax situation wasn’t exactly easy that year.
Anyway, the numbers lined up perfectly. So I used CreditKarma to file and have been happy with it ever since. Honestly at this point I’d pay for it, just to give them a more solid business model and development budget, but as far as I know they don’t even have a paid option!
I filed in February this year. It was easy.
I actively avoid Intuit products now.
(Though, pragmatism wins here to some degree: I did use their self-employment accounting tool for a few years even when I had switched away from their tax software. That tool makes it annoyingly easy to keep accurate books and Xero just wasn’t as good and simple at what I was looking for. If I was doing it again today, I’d definitely again look for alternatives. And frankly I think I’d find them now.)
CreditKarma did a pretty good job with my taxes this year, they just didn't handle premium tax credits very well. I had to get help filling out a form 8962, which strangely enough was full of (the equivalent of) null pointer exceptions. Not CreditKarma's fault, but hoo boy was that a nightmare of a form + instructions + worksheet (each with appendices).
I'm looking forward to them handling all these edge cases, too, so I can fully recommend them to my friends next year.
Yes, I always thought taxes were easy when I filed a 1040EZ.
Then came real life... and I discovered there were probably previous deductions I should have been taking (that exceeded the standard deduction) which could have saved me thousands of dollars and weren't available on the EZ.
too bad they sell your tax information, in all likelihood to companies like Equifax. now they don't have to ask your employers your salary anymore, you can just tell them.
Affiliates: We may share certain information with our affiliated companies, such as Credit Karma, to help us provide our Services and manage your account.
now, it seems fine for Credit Karma Tax to share information with Credit Karma. what exactly counts as an "affiliate" though? I mean, "affiliate marketing" is a common term, and that's pretty darn broad. I read it in the broadest terms possible, which would be "everyone we have a business relationship with", necessarily including TransUnion and probably other CRAs.
I was worried about this when I started using CreditKarma, too. Seven years of AMAs convinced me that unless the founder was a pathological liar playing a really long game, they probably didn't sell my information:
"Definitely not. We hate that model too. We do just fine by showing you offers that we believe will save you money. We think that is a win win. As a test, I always suggest people create a unique email account just for us. See if you get any spam in that account. All bets are off if you use a crappy email provider ;)" https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3zh78n/im_ken_lin_fou...
In the last two years I took a leap to CreditKarma’s tax offering. It is a bit basic and not quite as endlessly full featured, but it is simple, efficient, pretty quick and quite fast. It’s also entirely free. The first year I used it I ran my numbers in a competing product to check, I was self employed at the time, which meant my tax situation wasn’t exactly easy that year.
Anyway, the numbers lined up perfectly. So I used CreditKarma to file and have been happy with it ever since. Honestly at this point I’d pay for it, just to give them a more solid business model and development budget, but as far as I know they don’t even have a paid option!
I filed in February this year. It was easy.
I actively avoid Intuit products now.
(Though, pragmatism wins here to some degree: I did use their self-employment accounting tool for a few years even when I had switched away from their tax software. That tool makes it annoyingly easy to keep accurate books and Xero just wasn’t as good and simple at what I was looking for. If I was doing it again today, I’d definitely again look for alternatives. And frankly I think I’d find them now.)