Fuck you, TurboTax
Everyone loves tax season. Not. This will be my third year of filing taxes on my own. Year 1: Confusing and scary as hell. I obviously had no idea what I was doing. Thank goodness there's a handy little app by TurboTax to help! It cost $15, but it seems to be a good deal. All I had to do was snap a picture of my W-2 forms with the phone camera, and it would input all my information into the correct fields. Sounded like a great idea, but the image-to-text software they used wasn't very good; I had to manually change a lot of the fields. But whatever, it kinda works, and it's definitely better than filling it out by hand. When it was time to send it off, my federal tax return got rejected because TurboTax had some issue with their program. After a few days of emailing back and forth with their customer support, I ended up having to print it out to send it in.
Year 2: Time for taxes again! Now that I've done it once, it doesn't feel as intimidating anymore! Fired up the Turbo Tax app, and snapped some pictures. Image-to-text recognition still kind of sucked, so ended up filling a good amount of the fields manually. Everything looked good and ready to go. Oh what? It takes $20 to file my taxes electronically now? I didn't have to do that last year. Well... alright. I guess $20 bucks is a small fee to pay for the convenience of doing everything electronically. For some reason, my federal return was rejected. Had to log on and send it off again, and that time it went through. Whatever.
This year: Thought I could use the good old app again. Snapped a few pictures, checked the info, and good news- they finally fixed their text recognition software, only a small amount of mistakes this year! Oh no... now it's telling me I have to transfer my info and do my taxes on a browser instead because a few items in my W-2 form required it. Alright then, I'll hit the button to transfer over the info I just scanned in. Oh what, I already started a return online too, so I can't transfer it? Except I didn't... but ok, whatever. I log in online, and started entering all my information manually. Or, I try to, but keep getting interrupted. As soon as I log in, "Would you like to upgrade to TurboTax Basic? How about TurboTax Premium? We can do all these awesome things for you that you don't give a shit about!" About every ten "Continue" buttons I hit, I get bombarded with that stupid upsell. Is there a "No thanks and stop fucking asking me again" button? Best part comes at the end. "Guess what! You will have to upgrade to Basic and pay $19.99 to file your federal return electronically!" Ok, so I upgrade to Basic... I guess this is the "convenience fee" that I have to pay. Then it brings me to some other bullshit page. "The IRS might audit you! They do random audits, you know. Would you like to pay us another $50 bullshit fee so we can represent you legally if/when you get audited?" No. "Well, alright. Now that your federal return is set, you will need to pay another $40 fee to file your state return, so your total fee will be $60!" What. The. Fuck. At this point, I was thinking, "screw this shit". In previous years, they used to let you print out your returns so you can file them manually or print them out to save. But guess what? The only two buttons available on that page were, "Yes please, fuck me in the ass" and "No thanks, go ahead and delete all the files I just spent 2-3 hours filling out". I thought long and hard about this... is $60 worth it? The answer is obviously no, but that means I have to go print out all the tax forms that I already spent a good amount of time filling out, and refill everything again. At this point, I admit defeat. At least I know what program I won't be using ever again. Oh hey, look. They give the option of having them deduct the $60 from my federal refund! That's not so bad, since it's almost like free money anyway. Let's click the continue button! And then, of course, the small print: "For us to steal your $60 from your federal return, that'll cost you another $30 on top of that, bro." Seriously, FUCK YOU. I guess I have to click ANOTHER GODDAMN continue button to see what other refund options I have. "OH HAI! We have this super cool VISA Bullshit Card that you'd really want to put your refund on! Why don't you click that continue button down there, and you can choose this option on the next page!" STOP TRYING TO SELL ME SHIT I JUST WANT TO FILE MY GODDAMN TAXES. After another 20 pages of bullshit and upsells, I finally get my tax returns sent off. Do yourself a favor, folks-- If you haven't done your taxes yet, do NOT use TurboTax. Unless, of course, you enjoy clicking through 100+ continue buttons while browsing for cool ways they can take more money from you.
