Tax software
 

It’s that time of year again. Sigh. In the true spirit of procrastination, I’m thinking about thinking of doing my taxes. We use H&R Block software because we file our federal and then go to their brick and mortar for state taxes. My husband works in both NY and PA, and we live in PA. I thought I’d try to do state myself this year. Does anyone know if the software will calculate what we owe in each state?

Thanks in advance! Ok, back to thinking about thinking...

H &R block calculates our state taxes. I’m guessing they have all states in their system

I know they’ll do states, I was just wondering if they calculate for working in two states. NY and PA have some sort of agreement, but you have to claim all your income for NY taxes and then they only tax NY part, and you have to stand on your head with your left foot touching your nose...��

Oh sorry. Misunderstood

I used to do this decades ago before personal computers/software. I worked in PA and lived in NJ. If I remember correctly, you paid to the jurisdiction where you worked and got credit for that in the state in which you lived. Have you downloaded paper forms from PA/NY? Frankly, it might be easier to figure it out that way. In re-reading your initial post I see hubs get income from both states. Used to be - if I remember correctly - you paid the tax to the higher rated jurisdiction and then got that credit against the tax in your residential state. Could have changed/I could not be remembering correctly.

Since we opened an LLC several years ago now we have a private accountant do our taxes. Worth the fee as over those years we've gotten generally triple back what we paid in fees. Depreciation and all that sort of stuff that was far more complicated than I wanted to be bothered with at that point.

I tried Turbo Tax a number of years ago and, frankly, was underwhelmed. It asks you specific questions at the beginning of the process and if you don't exactly know the answer, you don't necessarily get the proper questions/line items that you need further down the line. Dinosaur that I am, I stuck w/paper when I was doing our taxes myself. Can't speak about the H&R software. Good luck.

Turbo tax will. It asks if you have income from more than one state.

Our Daughter did our taxes yesterday. We are both retired so it was very easy. She does them for several people and has for 35 or so years. Now she uses online tax programs.

DH has used TurboTax for several years now--we are both retired now,but also used when we had kids at home (so about 15yrs)and we both have income from other sources (DH as a writer, me with quilting). Our grown kids also use TurboTax and son has same situation you are talking about (work in one state, live in another) plus has a city earnings tax to deal with and TurboTax figures it all out for him.

You can go and input all your info for free and see how the software does the tax. I do that all the time. This year I found out that TaxAct and TurboTax didn't calculate the correct taxes owed (social security taxed was incorrect) so I then inputted into HRBlock. They did it correctly. How do I know? I am so paranoid about taxes that I make sure to calculate them myself first! Would have been an accountant if I didn't become a math teacher. One year I had to do 3 federal and 9 state returns, just for us and our two kids who moved a lot!