Tax season is coming up. I started looking at my oh-so-fun-tax software purchase decision. (Why are our laws so complex that I have to buy a new version each year?)
Intuit did a great thing this year – they simply sent out the install CD in the mail without my ever purchasing it (Intuit learns from AOL)! I put it into my computer and almost installed. But when I saw the price for TurboTax Deluxe 2009 Fed + State was $59.95, that seemed a little high. So I decided to look online, and it was a good thing I did!
I was pleasantly surprised to find Amazon carrying the exact same product (TurboTax Deluxe 2009 Federal + State) for only $46.54, with an electronic download. That’s a quick $13 savings if I just install from the net instead of the CD they sent me. I almost bought that too…
But then I thought I should check H&R Block’s TaxCut price. I’ve used TaxCut before and find it nearly identical to TurboTax. The H&R Block website sells TaxCut for a little less than TurboTax, at $44.95. That’s not enough cheaper than Amazon to be significant. So, I decided to check Amazon again.
And wow! TaxCut Deluxe (Federal + State + eFile) is selling for only $23.75 if you download online! Clearly this is a winner – less than half the cost of Intuit TurboTax.
As I wrote this, I bought and installed TaxCut. So far, so good.
Subject: What, no investment sales this year?
Owing CA taxes on options granted while a CA employee has placed me in the odd position of actually hiring someone to compute my taxes. The IRS having sent me a notice that my hired help completed them incorrectly leaves me using tax software to check their work (and mine, since this is the last year California gets a cut).
I ended up with the silly-expensive Premium version for investment tracking. Mike, what if any support does Deluxe have for managing investment / option / GSU sales? I’d be very surprised if you have no investment sales. How are you dealing with it? Computing schedule B by hand and plugging it into Deluxe?
J
P.S. Did you notice that the online and shrink wrapped versions appear to have feature parity this year? And a 30 USD premium on the shrink wrap version, at least if purchased directly from Intuit (and is the online version sold anywhere else?). Personally, I’ll pay $30 to keep the data out of the cloud, but I wonder how many more years I’ll have that option for…
Jeff – I haven’t had any troubles with tracking my assets; I never let these software programs hook up directly to my bank accounts, I just don’t use that feature. So many I’m in “manual mode”. I find it a bit repetitive, but it works great.