Save Yourself Thousands, Read This Before Using Turbo Tax
This past weekend I was feeling productive and I thought it would be a great time to work on our taxes. This is something I have done since I was sixteen years old, I have always been frugal and never wanted to pay someone to do them for me. This year seemed just like every other year but something went wrong.
As usual, it took me about an hour to complete the federal and state taxes for Savannah and me. But after completing everything it said that we owed close to $4,500 in state taxes. Immediately I was frustrated and angry, I couldn't imagine how this would be possible. We have always received a tax return some years bigger than others, but to be paying such a big amount absolutely shocked both of us.
After spending thirty minutes of stressing and contemplating not using Turbo Tax at all for our taxes things finally clicked as to why our taxes were incorrect. This year Turbo Tax is really pushing for you to upload your W-2's, which is what I did. But the automated system didn't pull all of the numbers/information from my W-2. So just because it didn't pull any information for box #17, it looked as if we owed thousands of dollars.
Luckily, we caught this error and now we have a few dollars coming back to us. But if you're doing your taxes online make sure you quadruple check every box that is entered that you're not doing manually, it's amazing how big of a difference it can make.