I filed using TurboTax Live Deluxe to see if tax season really could be painless

Hey, internet! As a Senior Creative Strategist here at Mashable, I have not yet entered the tax bracket of your Bezoses or your Musks — so, when tax season rolls around at the beginning of every year, I’m left without a devoted accounting team to crunch the numbers and maximize my refund. No, I must soldier onward by myself to face this annual headache of itemized receipts and intimidating paperwork. Or, do I? This year, I decided to give TurboTax a try, hoping to make short work of filing my taxes online and receive a hefty refund for my efforts. Here’s how my TurboTax experience went:

Made to match your lifestyle

I moved from New York City to Los Angeles in September, and though I’m thrilled to have traded another frozen Brooklyn winter for palm trees and blue skies, I forgot about one potential drawback. Tax season reminded me: having made income in New York and California, I’d need to file two separate state tax returns. Managing my usual federal and state returns gave me enough trouble on a good year, so the additional paperwork made it an excellent time to give TurboTax a try. I opted to use TurboTax Live Deluxe, which promised to maximize my deductions and credits, on top of offering live support from a real tax expert if I needed extra help. Since my skills with numbers tops out around “3 returns are harder than 2,” I’d take all the help I could get.

Fortunately, TurboTax made the process easy for me. First, through a series of lifestyle questions, it intuited I’d need help filing multiple state returns.

Right on. I started with my federal taxes, and TurboTax’s clean interface and simple questions guided me through the work. TurboTax recommended I take the standard deduction, rather than itemizing my deductions one-by-one, and displayed the mathematical difference between the options in terms clear for me — that is, those with dollar signs attached.

Federal taxes done, I moved through New York and California state taxes next. Here, I had a question related to charitable giving. I clicked over to the Live Assistance feature, and within 5 minutes, I was on the phone and sharing my computer screen with a very helpful tax expert named Tonia. She answered my questions with no trouble at all, followed along while I filled out a few forms on my screen, and voila. I was ready to file. All told, I’d finished three tax returns in a little over an hour, with refunds coming my way. I’ll never look back to the days of filing on my own.

Credit: TURBOTAX

Designed to be as painless as taking an online quiz

TurboTax’s UX mimics the smooth and familiar digital experience of taking an online personality quiz. Are you married? Click. Did you pay down a student loan this year? Click. Which sandwich would you be if you were a menu item at your favorite deli? (Okay, I made that one up.) The question-and-answer format made it much easier for me to feel confident I was following the right process.

Left to my own devices, I can have a difficult time even answering if I should file with any dependents — answer: no, the dog doesn’t count — so I greatly appreciated the guidance. Throughout filing, you can click back to specific areas of your federal or state returns to doublecheck your answers or update them. The Live Assistance screen-sharing feature was impressive, with a cursor and red highlighted box popping up to show me where Tonia, my tax expert, wanted me to click.

Help that’s actually helpful — and human

My TurboTax Live expert, Tonia, was a great help to me. I had expected a simple chat window for “on-demand help” — and while that feature exists, I much preferred the experience of having a knowledgeable and friendly human being talk me through some of my more inarticulate questions. Anyone who’s tried to call a customer service number over the past year knows the pain of hour-long waits, but I clicked the help button, entered my phone number, and found my phone ringing with Tonia on the line in five minutes.

You can connect with an expert for on-demand advice and answers, or schedule a video call at a time convenient for you. (I talked with Tonia by phone, but I know the video chat feature functions one-way only, meaning you can see your tax expert, but they can’t see you. Stay in your PJs, in other words.) Peace of mind goes a long way when it comes to your finances, and TurboTax Live Deluxe delivered on that for me. Thanks, Tonia.

Opens in a new window

Credit: Mashable Staff

Start for free with TurboTax.

 

Get Deal