TurboTax Premier Federal + State + eFile 2008 [OLD VERSION]

Purchased Turbotax Premier as I have done for the past several years. Wanted to try eFile this year. After competeing my tax return and the check for errors was complete I tried to eFile. Kept giving me the message I was not connected to the internet or there was an error connecting to the internet. After a few days of this we thought it best to mail the return (state eFile cost 19.95) while my wife was at the Post Office she was asked if we had done our taxes using Turbotax? When my wife said yes they asked why we didnt eFile. My wife told them about the error message and that was the same message they had. Also this years transfer of last years info was not as complete. May be time to bite the bullett and try another brand.

Other than the pricing issues mentioned by other people. I found this version of software is as buggy as the 2007 version. For example, * it stops responding to the clicking on any botton and you have to restart the program to get it working. * some of the date input doesnt take any space, or it will just reset the field. * the ISO stock transaction has problem if its not reported on w2. I am very disappointed.

If youre paying someone to do your taxes - STOP DOING THAT! TurboTax walks you through everything! And, even though the new Treasury Secretary couldnt figure out how to use it, TurboTax a) makes sure you get all of the tax breaks you deserve; and b) it is pretty hard to cheat on your taxes with TurboTax, too ... unless you leave out information. The bottom line is that you work your way step by step through TurboTax and NOTHING gets overlooked ... when youre done, TurboTax checks things over for you, too ... then you can file electronically, which is great (and speeds up your return) ... Probably the best feature about TurboTax is the getting started part. That is always the hassle in doing your taxes. Well, with TurboTax all you have to do is get your W2s, 1099s, and any other financial, year end statements ... then you just walk your way through TurboTax ... it has a calculator at the top of the screen giving you an up-to-the-minute status of how much you owe or will have to pay. And, then next year, when it comes time to do this all over again, TurboTax imports all of your information so getting started is effortless. And, with the IRS admitting to a 21 error rate in data entry, Electronic filing is the only way to go ... no chance for data entry errors and youll get your return much faster! Oh, and for you folks who like to or just wait until the last minute to do your taxes, TurboTax saves the day there, too, because youll get your taxes done much faster and without all the heartache. This year there is no fee for online filing ... in fact, if you do your taxes online (which is secure and safe with TurboTax), there is no charge for that either! TurboTax ... it is still the best ... since 1984 ... Disclaimer: I helped build the company known ChipSoft (the original company where TurboTax was born, thanks to a guy named Mike Chipman). I handled media relations and did the strategy and planning for growing the company ... It all started when I did one of the first comparative product reviews on tax software ... I picked TurboTax #1 then and I still feel it is #1 ... after I did the review, Mike contacted me to help him grow his company, so I jumped right in! I believe in this product and can recommend it completely and fully ... you wont believe how great it is to do your own taxes (and it is then when youll learn that with TurboTax you could have been doing your taxes all along!) ... oh, and one final point: In the early days when we were still selling the idea of people doing their own taxes, we started an advertising campaign of what we called love letters ... what we did was with the excess product left over at the end of the year, we sold those for just the price of shipping, with the ad campaign reading, Hey, check out your accountant and see if anything was missed on your taxe return. Well, we got hundreds of letters where people found not just $10 or $20 in deductions were missed ... it was THOUSANDS of dollars ... TurboTax is thorough in making sure you get every tax break you are entitiled to ... so, even if you still feel you want someone to do your taxes, get TurboTax anyway (Costco and Sams Club have great prices on the package) and just run the numbers on your own ... you know, just to be sure ... by doing that, youll see just how easy it is to do your taxes AND you just might find more coins than you would under the sofa cushions! [...]

I just finished my federal/state return on TurboTax and the experience motivates me to seek an alternate supplier for my next years filing. To my surprise, this years edition of TurboTax appears to be harder to use, more cumbersome, less trustworthy than the previous years. - Entries that I had little difficulty filing last year - local income tax (yes, we have that) paid to the local tax collector but not recorded on the W2 - were buried in a maze of difficult to comprehend options hiding behind the cheerful, easy to use interface. - Information, once entered, is sometimes hard to retrieve or readjust. The program creates dozens of worksheets and forms, most of them useless or unneeded and its not easy to get to the source entry for some specific item of information. Its all in there, mind you, but so is the needle hiding in that proverbial haystack. - Attempts to revise or check information force a choice between plunging into the user-friendly and largely redundant branch or the confusing maze of inter-connected forms, schedules and worksheets where its difficult to impossible to anticipate the consequences of adjusting some specific figure to the return overall. - The program seems to be generating its own errors by creating worksheets on its own and then, when error-checking is run, finding that it doesnt have sufficient information to back... nothing. For example, it didnt know how much income did I generate by using my house as a home office, even though I never even HINTED that I did that. - The HELP engine that comes with the program is almost completely useless and its online branches are from inconsistent to frustrating to maddening. For example. I was able to find some online discussions on how to enter my local income tax amount but I had to spend some precious time navigating through the HELP maze. In may case, I found another customers advice but, it turns out, in most cases, you must first crate a UserID on the LiveCommunity. And, of course, for ONLY $29.95 some live adviser would be happily and cheerfully answer any basic question that you may have that the HELP facility should have included to begin with. I am lucky because my tax return is relatively simple but I can see how much more frustrating the experience could be for those whose tax return needs are more sophisticated than mine. Ive been a TurboTax user for more years than I can remember but it is unlikely that I will be using TurboTax next year.

Ive used TurboTax for many years, and found the 2008 version confusing and not sure if it gave correct results.

As promised!

Product came as advertized, delivered on time. Price was not as competitive as I had hoped.

I bought this software with two goals: 1. Have it import all my stock trading information to prevent hours of data entry. 2. eFile my return to get my rebate ASAP, so I could pay off some credit cards and avoid paying interest. Unfortunately, TurboTax failed at both those tasks. When first importing stock trading information from my online brokerage, it didnt calculate the cost basis, which meant that TurboTax literally tried to add $20,000 in taxes for what should have been a tax deduction because of a net loss. I realized the error (things like that tend to *ahem* get my attention) and was able to research and enter the correct data after a few hours of work, but Im disappointed because the avoidance of labor was one of the things I thought I paid for when I bought the Premier edition. To make matters worse, TurboTax wont let me eFile! When I got to the end of my return, TurboTax told me that because I filled out part of a Schedule H (nanny tax) form, eFile isnt allowed because of what they said was IRS Regulation. Leary of the error message, I researched the matter and discovered the only time when both the IRS and Intuits TurboTax site mention the form in question is to say its supported for eFiling! I called support about it, and they saw no reason why an eFile shouldnt be allowed, so Im assuming the problem is another bug. What frustrates me the most about that is, 1. I paid for the eFile as part of the purchase price of the software and 2. since I want to pay off credit cards with my tax refund, the extra weeks required for paper mailing vs. eFiling mean more interest payments for me! Also worth noting is that support calls require long hold times, and all the undertrained support reps do is search their website for help files, so they dont do anything you cant do yourself and they arent especially helpful (especially on the day when the TurboTax website crashed and they had no other resource to fall back on). The one thing Ill say about TurboTax is at least it beats researching and filling out paper returns by hand, and it imported last years tax return information from an old TurboTax file. The bottom line is that I expected more, and am ultimately disappointed, but it did at least save a little work over trying to figure all the forms out myself. If I had to do it over again, Id probably go with H&R Block TaxCut instead. UPDATE: After some waiting and heavy Googling, I discovered the reason I couldnt eFile was because I didnt check a box that said I paid my nannys state unemployment tax by April 15, 2009. The good news is that I was able to eFile, but I still give TurboTax a demerit for not being able to tell me what was holding things up, either through the error message or telephone/email support.

TurboTax continues to be easy to use, reduces the time needed to prepare a return via transferring of information from previous returns, and when purchased at a discount without taxes and shipping cost is a value that is hard to equal.

I have used Turbo Tax for the last few years. My tax preparation is fairly complicated, but Turbo Tax handles it quite well.