- If you are a bargain hunter and you are wanting to
save some money on taxes and doing your taxes online, then you might be considering FreeTaxUSA. It's made several upgrades
throughout the years, which I'm very excited about. And so this video I'm
going to be showcasing and doing a complete walkthrough of the tax software
dashboard for FreeTaxUSA. Stick around. Hey guys, welcome back to
the College Investor channel. I'm your host, Justine. Here we talk about all things investing and personal finance for millennials, and we do robust tax software reviews. Every single year you can find all of our complete
walkthroughs and reviews at thecollegeinvestor.com. And we do these videos
so that you don't have to purchase something that you don't want or that doesn't work for
filing your taxes online. We know that this is a necessary
evil every single year. So you wanna really robust
and excellent software that gets you from point
A to B very, very fast. So FreeTaxUSA has been
around for a long time, and now with several upgrades
that they've been doing, they're getting closer and
closer to that premium feel, but not yet. They are not a TurboTax or an H&R Block. So let's talk about whether or
not FreeTaxUSA is truly free. Free is in the name, so you
gotta think, yes, it is free. Your federal tax return filing is free. Your state return is not. FreeTaxUSA also offers
multiple state returns. You'll just pay $14.99
per additional state that you need to file. Plus, you also have the opportunity, opportunity to upgrade
into different features that give you access to
things like audit support, other tax support, or just
an overlay of a tax pro to help you file those tax returns. For $39.99, you can get tax
support from a professional, and for $7.99, you can get
unlimited amendment returns and priority support. Now, as self-employed business owners, out-of-state landlords,
those who do side hustles, are probably going to
appreciate the low cost of using something like FreeTaxUSA to file more complicated returns. And because there isn't
a truly free version, there isn't any of these cherry-picking different tax situations to make sure that you actually fit their free version. Everybody falls within the same camp, which is really nice and very transparent in terms of pricing. So on the low end, you're going
to be paying about 15 bucks. If you choose to do the add-ons with some of those pro support features, then you're looking at around $55 all in to use this tax software. So what's new in 2024 for FreeTaxUSA? You're going to see this
pretty much across the board for all major tax software options, that it's going to be
updated for new tax law and code changes that
happened this past year. Another major upgrade that
FreeTaxUSA is providing this year is you have the ability to
import your W-2 from a PDF. Now, 1099 uploads from a
PDF are still not available, but the fact that they included
a W-2 import from a PDF is amazing and a huge time-saver. Also, with that tax
support option of the $40, you'll also get phone support
and personalized tax advice, which I think is really helpful, especially if you've done
your taxes for a while and you kind of know what to
expect, the W-2s, the 1099s, but you've also maybe
added some investments or maybe a dependent
where you bought a house, things are starting to get a little bit more complicated and messy, having this type of feature
could really help you still stay within that bargain level tier in terms of pricing and still
let you do it on your own while navigating more complex
tax filing situations. Okay, next, let's go ahead
and hop inside the dashboard and I'll show you what it looks like. If you are a repeat user of FreeTaxUSA, it's actually going to
copy over any information that you may have put
into the tax software for the new tax return
year, which I really like. One drawback that I saw off the top, and this kind of been a thing,
is you can't skip ahead. I get it, there's a flow and
a process to tax returns, but I don't know, this kind of bothers me that I can't skip ahead,
especially if you have a stack of fiscal tax return
documents laying on your desk and you happen to pick up a 1099 first, or you happen to pick a student
loan interest form up first and you wanna skip and
jump to that section, you really can't do that. You really have to start with your personal information first by listing out your
filing status, dependents, and then kind of a information summary of what you put in here. Now, I'm just putting in dummy information for the sake of this tutorial. By no means am I putting
in my personal information, but it gives you an idea
of how quickly you can get through some of the tax software. There is a bit of a manual process, but if you continue to use the
software over and over again each year, it's gonna
save time and headache on some of the stuff that you input. So I started with the
personal information, and then what I like about this visual, I'm a visual person
when it comes to taxes, 'cause I just, I don't
know what I'm working on. I don't know what I should be working on is the better statement. And now you can see, if
you click at the top, they have this menu bar
at the top of your screen, you can click on income,
and then you can see exactly what is the next step in terms of what you should be reporting. So typically, you're
going to start with a W-2. Any 1099-INT or DIV forms
are also going to be included in any of these other
types of tax situations that you might be in. Retirement income, social
security, unemployment income, all of those things are
underneath the income section. If you're a business owner, or if you've been doing
side hustles or contracting, you're gonna get those 1099s, or a Schedule C for your business income, or an S-Corp income,
which is a Schedule K-1. I really like the green check mark, and then the hollowed out check mark to show you exactly where
you're missing things, where you need to work on. And so in here, I went ahead
and added my W-2 information, and I just went line by line on the W-2, and just filled out
exactly what I needed to. So you're going to take
a look at your W-2, copy over the information as you see it, scroll to the bottom, save, and continue. And then it's going to
ask for more information, and it was really good, I felt like the software was really good about catching errors if I
reported something incorrectly. Now keep in mind, I'm
just typing in numbers. So it definitely spotted some things that were not correct the first go around, which, you know, is good. I want them to catch that sort of thing. Then you can continue to
add other W-2s if needed. So I'm gonna go back
here, and then continue. And then you're gonna see kind of a wages summary at the end. Once you get to this
section of your income, and they have these little
question mark buttons that you can pop open, and then it's gonna open up these pop-up, helpful little knowledge base forms. The only thing about this is (laughs) they could have done a better
job at presenting this, because this is like
scrolling upon scrolling for all sorts of income-related questions or pop-ups that you might have, like what is a Schedule F,
farm income and expenses. That could be you. So it is a little bit
wordy, I will say that, whereas tax software like
H&R Block or TurboTax is going to take out a lot of the jargon and only get what you need, but you're gonna pay a
premium price for that. So under the income section, if there are things
that you need to report, it's gonna show here a Start button for you to add that form. If you don't have that form, you skip it, you move on to the next section. What was interesting about
this is that last year, I had reported I had a 1099-DIV form, and so it says Needs Info, and it said we saved
your 1099-DIV information from last year, so it's
easier to enter this year. I love that. So then you just click Start, and then you can see the
1099-DIV, I put Ally Bank. Let's say I had ordinary
dividends of $500, and now it's going to
report that for 2023. So you can kinda see as you go along, like 2022, this was my income, and this is what I reported, 2023, this is what I reported. So you can quickly go into
some of those sections, Edit, and Start. So I do like the visual that it gives you to tell you exactly what's going on and where you're at in this process. So now the Income section
is pretty much done. If you are a business owner, again, all of those related business forms are going to be right here
under the Income section, and I do like that you
can do the menu of options to kinda pick and choose exactly which forms you need to complete. Okay, you can also report cryptocurrency inside of the tax software. If you didn't do any of these things, receive, sell, exchange, or gift, you can click No, save, and continue. And then you get a nice little summary after each of the major
sections has been filled out. Again, they're going to try to upsell you on some of those premium features, which is the $39.99 for
the tax pro support, and then also any of the screen shares, and also you do get the
ability to do screen share, which I think, you know, in this day and age, a screen
share is so, so helpful. So let's move on. Now we can finally move on
to deductions and credits. And so, ooh, this looks
new from last year. I don't remember they're doing icons. This is very similar
to H&R Block, actually. So do you have any of these deductions? If you're a homeowner,
you made a donation, taxes paid, out-of-pocket
medical expenses. Let's just see what's going on here. Donations to charities. Okay, not exactly a quick definition, but a good breakdown if you
wanted to know what qualifies. So let's go ahead and
click cash donations. Let's say we donated $1,000. I wonder why this said yes. So you do really have to go line by line to make sure that everything is accurate. Then it's gonna give you a recommendation of itemized deductions versus standard. I'll go ahead and take the standard. And now I'm just kind of going
through the Q&A guidance, which is really helpful. Again, you can kind of
see exactly where I'm at. Oh, I love this. It's an arrow pointing
to exactly where I'm at in the process. I almost like, this is
like a blueprint or a map of figuring out where you're at in the whole tax return process. It's like, am I getting
close to the finish line? I'm halfway through the
itemized deductions list. So that is helpful. It is more of a manual
process to do FreeTaxUSA, but I'm saving a lot of money
by using a software like this. And I feel like some of the enhancements that they've done so far
has been really helpful. (gentle music) Once I got through each
of the major sections, and they typically follow
the same format and process, which is why I just kind of
went through those sections very quickly to show you, once you get the hang
of one major section, you're gonna get the hang
of deductions, credits, miscellaneous, and then
once you get to the end, you get to this federal tax summary, and then you get to see this
nice little clean report of what you've entered. I would definitely take a look at this and the documents that you have in hand or digital documents and bump that up to what exactly you put into the software so you know you have
everything accounted for. And so I just found
this really easy to use. It was a little clunky in terms of if there's something that you didn't know, and the jargon and the pop-up
windows was kind of a lot. If you get overwhelmed
with that sort of thing, then I think something
like the TaxPro support would come in handy, where you could have
somebody walk you through or maybe you're incurring an error, you have the ability
to chat with an expert. And I also liked here up at the top, it's actually sticky here,
it's just gonna show you the potential federal refund
that you might be getting based off of what you put
inside of the tax software. So is FreeTaxUSA worth it? If you're looking to save on cost and you don't mind manually entering in a lot of your forms, then yeah, it could definitely be worth it. It's made some major improvements to the inside of its dashboard, and I found the user experience
to be a lot more pleasant than in the past years
that I've actually used the tax software, so
that's been a huge plus. Now, you're not going to
get the premium feature of being able to
automatically import tax forms like you would with a TurboTax, where it automatically syncs
up with investing institutions so that you can report what happened inside of different investing accounts. You're not gonna get that with FreeTaxUSA, so the more that you
have financially going on and the more complex your
tax filing situation is, the more that I would probably
steer clear of FreeTaxUSA, but it's such a great
tool for those who have pretty simple and straightforward
tax filing situations. Don't forget, we have the
latest tax software reviews and walkthroughs available
for you to check out at thecollegeinvestor.com, before you hop into a tax
software that you're like, oh, this is way too complicated, read one of our thorough reviews. We will leave a link below
for you to check out. If you like this one,
give it a big thumbs up, and we'll catch you in the next one.
