Taxes!

Taxes... Filing a federal income tax return is the dreaded task that most Americans have to do by April 15th of each year. In years past, when we owned businesses, we had an accountant do our taxes. But since we sold everything, our tax situation and life have become a lot simpler. Now I do our taxes.

Last year, I used Turbo Tax's online service. It was free for the federal return and cost about $20 for the state with electronic filing. Naturally, this year I went back to the Turbo Tax site to file my taxes again, but I was meet with a little surprise. Turbo Tax wanted to charge us approximately $70 to file our federal and state income tax returns. After researching our situation, I found that a lot of people were in the same boat and were pretty upset about it.

My first thought was to fill the taxes out by hand and check them against the Turbo Tax numbers. Then I saw a comment, on the Turbo Tax web site, stating that FreeTaxUSA.com does not charge for federal income tax return and only charges $9.95 for the state return. I decided to give it a try. I plugged our numbers into FreeTaxUSA.com program and got the exact same tax totals that I had gotten from Turbo Tax. This boosted my confidence in the FreeTaxUSA.com program, so we electronically filed our taxes using their online service.

So if you are looking for an online service to complete your federal (and maybe state) income tax return, then I highly recommend FreeTaxUSA.com. Next year, we might be in the Caribbean when it is time to file our taxes, I hope that FreeTaxUSA.com is still around so that we can file them electronically for free!