I finally blocked out a bit of time to take an early look at our taxes now that all of our W2’s and 1099’s have arrived. I haven’t bought the 2009 Turbotax software yet so I decided to just quickly punch all the numbers in to the Turbotax website with bogus personal information. With both my wife and I working and online income, it has pushed us up in to a higher tax bracket. As I entered just my income information, Turbotax was showing we’d be getting over $5K back with std deductions. Once I added my wife’s income and online income in, we went in to the negative territory. Luckily we both increased our withholding through the year to cover the online income that we have to report. We could have made the estimated tax payments every quarter but, frankly, I hate doing that so I opted to just crank up our withholding. In the end it appears to have worked out. After throwing in all of our mortgage interest deductions, property taxes, sales taxes etc, we are now looking at an estimated $400-600 refund. That’s the first year in a few that we’ll actually be getting money back. Of course it’s best to try to zero out on your taxes so that the government isn’t getting an interest free loan, but based on the amount of taxes we paid this year, I’d say a $600 margin of error was pretty good!
Of course, I won’t know for sure what the real number is until I shell out the cash for the latest Turbotax version. I won’t do that until I see a screaming deal on it!
(I will admit that this is a bit of shameless plug for my blog.) If you haven’t bought TurboTax, you could consider entering the H&R Block Giveaway Contest by posting a comment on my blog. I have a copy of the tax software that I want to give away, and I will draw a winner next week.
I actually have both TurboTax and Block At Home for TY 2009. You can import last year’s TurboTax return into H&R Block, and vice versa. My opinion is that the TurboTax software is bigger, and more glitzy, but the end result is identical to H&R Block. So, I usually go with the cheaper option.
Well I am going to buy very soon Turbotax software,as it’s been very popular and quite useful as well.So let’s see for me as well.