Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by flatiron 1584 days ago
If you sold a single stock throughout the year you are excluded from all the free tax filing software I’ve seen. A bunch of my income is in RSUs. For us I need a VM to run TurboTax
3 comments

I used FreeTaxUSA with a Wealthfront account that had stock trading. Wasn’t charged.
FreeTaxUSA is strangely under-mentioned on these threads. I’ve used it the last couple years with a complex-ish situation. Not a single complaint.
I initially tried it because CreditKarma had egregious errors last time, like:

1) Inverting my answer to “have you sold cryptocurrency” on the forms.

2) Silently removing decimal points (changing 8.005 to 8005 shares in the forms)

3) Persisting an entry for income after I tried to delete it and re-enter, with no way to fix it even after talking to support.

4) Having forms with an overlay “do not use”.

FreeTaxUSA still refused decimal points in the forms (like in item 2) but at least warned me so I could work around it.

I’ve done my taxes with FreeTaxUSA for a few years as well. The webapp is simple, with no swooshing animations - but it gets the job done for 1/4 the price of TurboTax these days.

A few years ago I benchmarked the two together and they basically gave the same answers. They also don’t hold your past returns hostage.

I’ve been recommending them to everyone that I talk to about taxes.

For me no animations (except a real loading circle) is a plus point. I don't want to spend time looking at a fake circus display of taxes. Its form filling, I just want to fill data and be done with it.
I tried it last year and really liked it.
didn’t know about it until i browsed /r/tax
I have filed with all sorts of wild overcomplicated ISO/ESPP/RSU/NSO/etc employee stock compensation and never had to use anything other than the webapp. Why do you need to run the desktop application at all?
> A bunch of my income is in RSUs. For us I need a VM to run TurboTax

No you don't. I've sold stock more years than not and I've never needed to do that.