Tax Time: My Review of Turbo Tax Deluxe 2009

The Super Bowl is finished, the W-2’s and 1099’s have come in the mail.  Time to file my federal taxes for 2009.  Since my experience using Turbo Tax for the last several years has been a good one, I again chose it for 2009.  This year I chose TurboTax Deluxe Federal + State 2009 + efile to prepare my federal & state taxes.

Here’s my experiences and observations this year, broken down by the Federal and State returns (thankfully I did not have to file any city returns this year)

Federal:

• Saved me some time by importing everything from last year’s return – dependent information, address, income tax paid last year, etc.
• Guided me through all of the different sections of my return with fairly easy to answer questions.  They have made this even better in 2009 with their “GPS” features.  Everything is very well organized and easy to go through.
• Its Deductible, a huge time saver when trying to calculate the value of donated goods, has moved back into the program, but there is also an integration with the online version.  Again, Its Deductable maximized my refund by using donated item valuations that were acquired by using actual resale data from eBay.
• Overall I was happy with the federal part of Turbo Tax 2009.  It took me about 3 hours to fill out & e-file (for free!) my 1040, including itemizing, some additional miscellaneous forms, and entering a few pages of chairitable good donations I had made over the year.

State:

• The state form in TurboTax Deluxe Federal + State 2009 + efile was easy and fast because most of the information carried over from the federal form, except for some state specific deductions (like 529 accounts, food bank donations, property tax credit etc).
• There is no free e-file for the state forms.  Being the cheapskate that I am, I decided to mail in the state form, because I was only getting a small refund.  I ended up having to put two stamps on the envelope to mail it all, but it still was less than the $19.95 Intuit wanted for the state e-file.
• It took me about  an hour to fill out the state form.
• Overall I was pleased by the state form.  They seemed to correct a lot of the issues from last year’s state program.

Conclusion/Summary:

Turbotax again put out a good product and  I would recommend it for anyone preparing their taxes.  Intuit has continued to excel in this area.  I have not dared go back to H&R Block TaxCut since a bad experience a few years ago when I tried to switch.

Links:
Federal Tax Forms and Publications at irs.gov
State Tax forms for every state

(Photo: alykat)