neidu3Mar 13

I just finished doing my 2025 taxes

https://sh.itjust.works/post/56745869

I just finished doing my 2025 taxes - sh.itjust.works

Spent 10 minutes with my SO, moving our shared deductions between us to see which distribution resulted in the lowest amount of taxes. Turns out that the tax authorities are pretty good at what they do, as the best distribution was what they’d already prefilled. Despite having very different income, no matter how we moved the numbers, the numbers at the bottom didn’t change in a manner where the total would result in a higher refund. So we both ended up filing our taxes with no changes to the prefilled values.

Show threadRhynoplazMar 13
Since we’re on the topic, this year I quit using turbo tax, and tried freetaxusa. It’s just as easy, they found me a bigger refund, and it’s a LOT less expensive to file.
Show threadneidu3Mar 13

I never quite understood wtf is up with how the US tax system somehow includes a filing cost. I’d love to learn more, but I suspect it’d get me way too excited for this community, and not even in a good way.

All the relevant numbers should already be registered somewhere. Pulling them into a prefilled form should be trivial.

Show threadRhynoplaz

Bamboo is right, you could do it all for the price of a stamp if you grabbed the paper forms and filled them out, but you risk missing deductions that you don’t know to look for, or making an error that gets you on legal trouble.

Taxes were easy when I was a young broke adult, and I would do them myself on paper, but once I started owning things and having kids, the extra refund money that a professional or software would find was worth more than the cost to get their help.

Mar 13 at 7:00pmWeb
Show threadneidu3Mar 13
I haven’t done my taxes on paper in over 20 years.