Works For Me Wednesday-Turbo Tax

Do you pay an accountant or tax preparer to do your taxes?  Or do you save money and do them yourself?  I always used to do our taxes myself but then Hubby and I bought a house--so that meant no more filing short form.  And deducting the blessed mortgage interest?  Somebody help!  That's when someone I worked with told me about Turbo Tax.  It was like the heavens parted and showered me with tax preparation blessings!  This is the seventh year I have used it and I know for certain we will keep using it.

In fact, I called around last year because now that we have a rental property, I knew things were going to be a lot more complicated.  Turbo Tax walks you through all sorts of different scenarios/questions to make sure you are taking advantage of your write offs.  Now, some people worry about the accuracy, but I fully believe as long as you are completely honest in answering all the questions that are asked (did you move this year?  was your move more than xxx amount of miles? was your move for a job? how much was your mortgage interest? etc, etc.) you should have no reason to worry about being arrested for tax evasion. 

Plus, Turbo Tax keeps all your information year to year and compares your current year to the previous years and suggestions things like, you had donations last year, what were your donations for this year?   If you want you can print out all 70 pages of your taxes, or it allows you to download a nice little Adobe file on your computer--yes, they are green too!


Now, back to the cost.  Most accountants/tax preparers were going to charge anywhere from $150-$300 for doing our taxes with our rental/investment property and with Turbo Tax it would be around $50.00 + tax.  That right there is a savings.  But wait, there's more! 

This is the best part of the tip~

Most financial institutions partner with Turbo Tax and offer some sort of discount to their customers.  You can start your taxes just by going to TurboTax.com BUT when you get ready to file, go to your financial institutions site and find their link for Turbo Tax and log on to Turbo Tax using your financial institutions link.  That will trigger the automatic discount you receive for being a customer with that institution.  We have several institutions (our main bank, our credit union, where our mortgage is held, etc.)--make sure to check out each of your institutions because the Turbo Tax discount will vary.  Our main bank offered a 20 % discount but one of our other banks offered nearly a 40 % discount--which of course is double the savings.  With the discounts we received, we paid just over $35 to get our taxes done.  Nice, huh?

Using Turbo Tax and getting discounts definitely Works for Me!

***This post is in no way affiliated with Turbo Tax.  They have never heard of my blog, nor do they care.  I just think it's a great tool and want to share it with the world.***