When I got married, I took charge of doing our joint taxes. My wife was a big fan of TurboTax, and I had done everything by hand. Of course, I didn't have the rental property which she had, and when tax time rolled around, I RTFM, and discovered that she had been doing some things wrong, and we could collect back several kilobucks from the government.
However, I also decided that the record keeping was enough of a pain that I would go ahead and use turbotax, (until the evil DRM reared its ugly head).
So I ended up redoing 3 years of tax returns, (in addition to the current year), which meant collecting up the versions of turbotax from each of those years, etc.
I'd be surprised if the web version will let you go back and amend things for free, etc.
Anyways, to summarize:
Tax software is not a substitute for using someone's brain. If you don't want to understand the tax instructions (they're not that hard, and turbotax, etc. have EXCELLENT tutorials), then you better get an accountant.
There's plenty of free as in beer software for doing your taxes. TaxAct is free for federal...
Using the web based stuff has upsides and downsides, understand them.
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However, I also decided that the record keeping was enough of a pain that I would go ahead and use turbotax, (until the evil DRM reared its ugly head).
So I ended up redoing 3 years of tax returns, (in addition to the current year), which meant collecting up the versions of turbotax from each of those years, etc. I'd be surprised if the web version will let you go back and amend things for free, etc. Anyways, to summarize: