TurboTax Premier Federal + State + eFile 2008 [OLD VERSION]

I have used Tax Cut for years. Too much manual data entry. Turbo Tax is worthy of the name. I have an active investment account and a mutual fund that rebalances frequently. I imported all the 1099 information without error, fast. With Tax Cut I always had to complete the foreign tax credit form myself. Turbo Tax did it for me. How painless. The interview screens are comfortable to use and have plenty of additional information if you need it. With five e-files I can do taxes for the whole family. Pricey but money well spent for me. I will use it from now on.

I love TurboTax and have always used them to handle all of our tax return needs, but this year everything changed. This year they changed the operating system requirements for Mac which would have forced up to upgrade to a newer operating platform. TurboTax is still our favorite, but we cannot afford to upgrade our iMac to handle current software. Ridiculous! Even the TurboTax site prohibits you from finalizing your returns without current hardware. Oh well, better luck next year... I guess?

I bought this software with two goals: 1. Have it import all my stock trading information to prevent hours of data entry. 2. eFile my return to get my rebate ASAP, so I could pay off some credit cards and avoid paying interest. Unfortunately, TurboTax failed at both those tasks. When first importing stock trading information from my online brokerage, it didnt calculate the cost basis, which meant that TurboTax literally tried to add $20,000 in taxes for what should have been a tax deduction because of a net loss. I realized the error (things like that tend to *ahem* get my attention) and was able to research and enter the correct data after a few hours of work, but Im disappointed because the avoidance of labor was one of the things I thought I paid for when I bought the Premier edition. To make matters worse, TurboTax wont let me eFile! When I got to the end of my return, TurboTax told me that because I filled out part of a Schedule H (nanny tax) form, eFile isnt allowed because of what they said was IRS Regulation. Leary of the error message, I researched the matter and discovered the only time when both the IRS and Intuits TurboTax site mention the form in question is to say its supported for eFiling! I called support about it, and they saw no reason why an eFile shouldnt be allowed, so Im assuming the problem is another bug. What frustrates me the most about that is, 1. I paid for the eFile as part of the purchase price of the software and 2. since I want to pay off credit cards with my tax refund, the extra weeks required for paper mailing vs. eFiling mean more interest payments for me! Also worth noting is that support calls require long hold times, and all the undertrained support reps do is search their website for help files, so they dont do anything you cant do yourself and they arent especially helpful (especially on the day when the TurboTax website crashed and they had no other resource to fall back on). The one thing Ill say about TurboTax is at least it beats researching and filling out paper returns by hand, and it imported last years tax return information from an old TurboTax file. The bottom line is that I expected more, and am ultimately disappointed, but it did at least save a little work over trying to figure all the forms out myself. If I had to do it over again, Id probably go with H&R Block TaxCut instead. UPDATE: After some waiting and heavy Googling, I discovered the reason I couldnt eFile was because I didnt check a box that said I paid my nannys state unemployment tax by April 15, 2009. The good news is that I was able to eFile, but I still give TurboTax a demerit for not being able to tell me what was holding things up, either through the error message or telephone/email support.

Product came as advertized, delivered on time. Price was not as competitive as I had hoped.

The major change in Turbo Tax this year is their HUGE increase in price. It is a hidden price increase. If you want to do your kids simple tax returns, you have to now pay for each one which is unlike ALL previous years!! When I contacted customer service to ask about the change, their answer was just a line trying to get you to believe they were saving you money. I have used Turbo Tax close to the beginning of the software development, but 2007 was my last. What a poor decision by what used to be a great company.

Well, good product.

As promised!

I just finished my federal/state return on TurboTax and the experience motivates me to seek an alternate supplier for my next years filing. To my surprise, this years edition of TurboTax appears to be harder to use, more cumbersome, less trustworthy than the previous years. - Entries that I had little difficulty filing last year - local income tax (yes, we have that) paid to the local tax collector but not recorded on the W2 - were buried in a maze of difficult to comprehend options hiding behind the cheerful, easy to use interface. - Information, once entered, is sometimes hard to retrieve or readjust. The program creates dozens of worksheets and forms, most of them useless or unneeded and its not easy to get to the source entry for some specific item of information. Its all in there, mind you, but so is the needle hiding in that proverbial haystack. - Attempts to revise or check information force a choice between plunging into the user-friendly and largely redundant branch or the confusing maze of inter-connected forms, schedules and worksheets where its difficult to impossible to anticipate the consequences of adjusting some specific figure to the return overall. - The program seems to be generating its own errors by creating worksheets on its own and then, when error-checking is run, finding that it doesnt have sufficient information to back... nothing. For example, it didnt know how much income did I generate by using my house as a home office, even though I never even HINTED that I did that. - The HELP engine that comes with the program is almost completely useless and its online branches are from inconsistent to frustrating to maddening. For example. I was able to find some online discussions on how to enter my local income tax amount but I had to spend some precious time navigating through the HELP maze. In may case, I found another customers advice but, it turns out, in most cases, you must first crate a UserID on the LiveCommunity. And, of course, for ONLY $29.95 some live adviser would be happily and cheerfully answer any basic question that you may have that the HELP facility should have included to begin with. I am lucky because my tax return is relatively simple but I can see how much more frustrating the experience could be for those whose tax return needs are more sophisticated than mine. Ive been a TurboTax user for more years than I can remember but it is unlikely that I will be using TurboTax next year.

I have been using TurboTax to prepare our returns for several years. The product keeps improving, although the price continues to go up as well. I have been buying the Premium version the past couple of years as we have some rental properties and some (rapidly declining) stock/mutual fund assets - and figured that the Premium version would be able to tell me if we had additional tax deductions/etc. EZ import of old data, EZ guide through the tax return preparation burden/process (wish we had a flat tax system in place!!). Recommend this product. Wish their Mac version of Quicken would improve/catchUP to where their Windows version is...

Turbotax is certainly as easy and convenient to use as its reputation suggests, but I seem to have found two errors in its software. I had an annuity that was marked as 100% taxable, as it had been every year, yet TT kept listing the income as tax-free. I tried every way I could think of to get help, but was unable to obtain an answer to my question, so I decided to file by hand, the old fashioned way. I was certainly glad I did. I found California allows a deduction of up to $500 for property taxes, even for taxpayers who take the standard deduction, and TT missed that.