Review:
I found freetaxusa much easier to navigate than Turbotax.
Turbotax seems to be geared towards people who want to be handheld through the tax interview one time, and then never review the numbers to make sure everything adds up. If you do try to go back through things, you are asked a lot of redundant questions (and pitched upgrade offers) again and again, just to find the numbers you wanted to double-check.
With freetaxusa there is a convenient summary of each section and the overall numbers. The menus let you drill to sections a little more quickly. Each screen is more dense than Turbotax, which means less total pages to complete a section. I find that preferable, although I recognize that some people may prefer to hit next 16 times to complete a section...
Two cons: in the W-2 entry form, a couple of the fields (e.g. State Income) did not have enough digits to enter decimals, and the fields were too small to see the whole number.
Also, some fields do not allow commas, which seem perfectly "safe" to me. (I can't imagine filling out my taxes by hand and being prevented from writing a comma on the paper.)
Jeoff |
