TurboTax vs TaxCut 2008

TurboTax has been wonderful over the years but the 2008 price totally made me baulk. An eye popping $229.80 this year for my needs:

$49.95 Premier inc Rental Properties + $34.95 Per State
$109.95 Business including S Corporations

H&R Block Home & Business 2008 promises the same functionality for $67.96 (Google for a discount coupon code). This was enough of a saving to try it, worst case I waste a few hours and buy TurboTax.

Since the IRS have not finalized rules for 2008 a few areas are not yet available including what seemed to be almost all the s-corp filing. Still I entered our W2s, a dummy 1099 and all the details on my rental properties with no issue. Everything was as easy as it was with TurboTax. There are still all the detailed sections to ensure you are aware of what can be deducted without reading 17,000 pages of IRS publications or trying to get a comptent accountant to talk to you. As for problems so far,  non are worth mentioning being just very minor niggles. Before buying I read online that H&R does not even let one print PDFs – well I just saved my 2008 draft with no problem (File -> Save As PDF…).

Here are a few samples screens, please don’t laugh at the repairs on the rental – it has barely an issue for five years and last year seemingly everything broke:

Looks a lot like TurboTax right? Go ahead save the money, you’ll feel amost right at home

As with Turbo Tax this Rental screen  maps straight to the tax form field – ah this is soo simple 🙂

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