Do Your Taxes!
As promised in my previous post regarding tax documentation, I wanted to review several options for doing your taxes and hopefully some helpful tips along the way.
By this time, you should have received most of your basic documentation like W-2’s (income) and 1098’s (mortgage interest). You may have received some 1099’s for bank account interest and/or investments sold, but these will continue to come into early February. Make sure you are armed with all of your documents before you get started. If you are missing some forms come mid-February contact the appropriate organization (job, bank, etc) to ask for a second copy to be mailed.
For this blog, I’m going to make the assumption that you worked in 1 state and that you are looking to minimize the cost of preparing and filing your taxes. If you worked in multiple states, had multiple real-estate transactions and multiple investment transaction you will most likely want to seek help from a professional tax adviser.
This is in no way the ultimate list of tax-filing solutions so if someone has come across better solutions, please post these in the comments.
1. If your Adjusted Gross Income is less than $56,000, check out the free filing via irs.gov.
2. For those of you willing to fill out all of your tax forms by yourself, but online, check out the list of e-file partners from the IRS. The majority of these partners will allow you to submit your federal taxes for under $10, but do not provide any assistance on filling out the appropriate tax forms.
3. If you want a little assistance, but still want to file on-line, check out the following sites:
- H&R Block
- TurboTax
- CompleteTax
Note that the above are specific to Federal income tax filings, but often offer State Tax filing as well. Don’t forget to file your State income tax as well!
Hopefully this will get you started in a not so fun activity. As I mentioned, please comment if you have other ideas or ways of filing that are more efficient.
