Filing Taxes Online

I started filing my taxes online in the year 2000 and have used the Turbotax web site every year to submit them.  Their service worked very well, so when I started receiving my tax-related paperwork (W2 forms, 1098 forms), I went to the TurboTax site and started entering the information.

Because I had refinanced my home in 2008, I was not sure how much of the mortgage interest I could claim as a tax deduction.  I thought the software on the site would figure this for me, but it does not.  You have to determine that amount and enter it.

I did some research and found the IRS has Publication 936 that explains the home mortgage interest deduction.  This is the link to Publication 936, if you are needing this information your self.  You can get a PDF file to print out if you go to the Publications and Notices section of the site.  After reading the PDF, I was still worried I was doing something wrong.

Because you don’t have to pay until you are ready to file your return, I decided to try out H&R Block’s web site too and see if it was any better in the area of mortgage interest deductions. It was very similar to Turbotax and worked fine, so I’d recommend either site.

I decided to use a feature on the H&R Block site that would let me ask a tax professional a question.  I could not submit my question until I had paid for the filing of my return, so I decided to use H&R Block to file my return and paid them.  I asked my question about mortgage interest and about an hour later I received my response saying that I was figuring it correctly.

I finished filing my taxes and am getting a very good refund this year.  I am very happy about that.  I’m going to put some of it in a savings account to use as our emergency fund and then put the rest toward paying off debt at the top of my debt snowball.