2013 Tax Time!

So as my wife is asleep (passed out at 8:30 PM!), I decide that this is the perfect opportunity to enter our 2013 taxes into three separate programs (while no one can bother me): Turbo Tax, Tax Act, and H&R Block to see which program would get us the most tax refund.  There are other tax programs I can try to, but you know what?  Nah..  It turns out that the numbers for all three programs came out to be very close to each other as one would assume.  But then again, technically, programatically, governmentally, shouldn't the numbers come out to be exactly the same?  Anyway, the results are 1) Turbo Tax 2) Tax Act 3) H&R Block:

Turbo Tax (+$18) more than Tax Act (+$32.00) more than H&R Block.

These are the amounts before paying any federal and state filing fees so I will have to take that into consideration as well.  I'm not quite ready to file yet as I want to go through all my documents, income, credits and deductions one final time just in case I missed something and Uncle Sam gets to keep more of our hard-earned moolah.



As I was entering all the numbers like a data entry mad man into all three programs, out of all the programs, I have to say that I am very impressed with Turbo Tax's UI (user interface) and ease of use.  It comes with that clean look of Windows iconic Metro design along with flat elements of Apple's latest iOS 7 design.  It was, hands down, the easiest of the three to use with it's intuitive guidance from entering numbers, to answering questions, and guiding me through screen after screen.  Turbo Tax was also the only software that detected my employer's FED ID number and automatically imported all figures from my W2 (huge plus and time saver).  Second place would have to go to H&R Block with the worst being Tax Act.  H&R Block did a nice job of asking me of what forms I have up front so that I can fill them out at the beginning without having to look through every single section that wasn't relevant to me unlike Tax Act.  I just had a hard time with Tax Act. Very hard.  With it's outdated UI to using Times New Roman as their font.  Really?  And on each screen, there was a lot of text to read.  It made me read through screens that were totally irrelevant to my tax situation and almost bored me to death.  The only positive that came out of using it was it did net me $32.00 more than H&R Block, but like I said before, I have to see how much each will charge to file my federal and state taxes.

Knowing how much tax refund we'll be getting is a good thing, bad thing, or rather inevitable.  The good part of it is that we're getting money back from the government.  I know a lot of tax professionals stress the fact that if we're getting money back, it's actually bad because we're giving Uncle Sam a free loan.  But quite honestly, I'd rather get something back instead of having to pay more taxes after already having paid 30% of our gross income.  I gotta tell ya, I had to pay a few years back and that was one of the worst feelings.  The bad part of it is that I was expecting to get a lot more back.  At least 3 x's more!  Oh well, I guess the good in that bad is that we were able to keep more of our money per paycheck after paying taxes and yet managing to get a refund.  At least it's more than enough money to replenish our emergency fund and then some.

I think we're in a good place.  Like I said, we have enough taxes withheld from our paychecks so that we pay our taxes and get something back from Uncle Sam while at the same time our exemptions on our W4 enables us to keep more money from our paycheck so that we can apply it to our debt snowball as we move along our journey to zero debt.