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When I was an employee, sure. It's not difficult at all. Now that I'm self-employed and have three times as many forms to worry about, schedule C, depreciation tables, eff that. I just spend $100 for the software. It's worth it at that point. For a simple 1040 form unless you've got lots and lots of investments you can probably knock that out by hand in an hour.
I used to do my taxes by hand, but not on paper. I put the 1040 form into a spreadsheet along with all the worksheets and I would fill it in that way in the spread sheet, have it calculate everything for me, and then I would fill in those numbers by hand into the 1040 form. We always filed Schedule A and D so this helped a lot. I only had to update the tax tables every year but the rest would pretty much stay the same.
The trouble is, every year I would get a letter from the IRS saying I incorrectly calculated something somewhere. Ooops. Sometimes it was in my favor and they owed me money, sometimes I owed them more money. I got tired of that and now just use Turbo Tax.
Irs.gov is free for most people who earned under $50k annually but there are some age and location restrictions. But, can always print out paper forms/read instructions on irs.gov.
I ran into a glitch on irs.gov's H&R Block website so I did have to submit it on paper for my small business. I didn't have a lot of income last year due to two illnesses & tons of medical bills...website wouldn't take a negative income from the business expenses. So submitted it on paper. No audit notice yet!
I do submit my state taxes on the state Dept of Revenue site or using paper forms. H&R Block website provided free by accessing link on IRS.GOV has messed up my state income taxes EVERY time for last 3+ years. The workflow tries to ********* into transferring your data to the state income tax form for $15 fee but is ALWAYS wrong.
I have no reason why you would. I like to though and am wondering if anyone besides myself does.
I did until the year before last. A few years back I started getting royalties from books I've written and the extra tax forms annoyed me to no end. So, I started doing it online. But I wish I could go back to the paper 1040EZ form; that used to take me about five minutes to do.
Is there really a free online income tax filing service? Would you share the names of the online services that don't add aditional fees? They all seem to find something to charge for. What is a reasonable fee for one of the online tax services...and why?
I do my parent's taxes on Turbo Tax. They have very simple returns and has been completely free for federal and state returns. They do offer optional upgrades during the process, but I just ignore them and go about the process.
I used to until this year. I always seem to make a mistake, and get a letter from the IRS with figures I can't understand. "Our figure" "Your figure" -- both the same, but somehow I made a mistake. Last one I got, I resorted to sending them snail mail asking them to explain, last August, JUST got a letter back from them, saying they need a little more time. I forgot what the original problem was.
I tried using the IRS free E-file last year but kept getting error messages when I hit submit. Finally gave up and printed it out and mailed it in.
I always filed paper returns until this year, doing it myself. I’m getting a refund and got scared about the warnings of how far behind the irs is. I got my refund 6 days after filing, using the irs own free electronic filing program. That income limit for the irs free program doesn’t disallow you from using it for free after you exceed the limit, it just defaults to becoming less helpful in filling it out, meaning you have to do some of your own thinking if you exceed the income limit. I used the same program for my state taxes, since I was already mucking around in the program, and it did charge me $14 for the state filing, but that’s pretty negligible. Haven’t gotten that refund yet, but it’s only been 12 days.
My grandfather passed away in December at 88 . He hated computers and still did his taxes on paper and mailed them in.
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