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| ~ Rant ~ |
I've used Intuit's, free, online version of TurboTax for years to file my income taxes. Eight years of being mostly unemployed or underemployed have left me solidly (and sadly) qualified for the free, tax preparation services.
By sticking with Intuit's, free, online version of TurboTax, my previous year's income tax information was readily available to automatically fill in a lot of parts in the many multiple forms.
As with previous years, TurboTax showed me my contact information, my previous employer's information, and a summary of last year's return. When I clicked on the "Continue" button, I was taken to a page listing three pricing categories. "Free", "Plus" for an extra $30, and "Upgrade" for more money that I did not want to spend (I'm paraphrasing but that's the gist of the titles).
What was different this year, from all the previous years that I had used TurboTax online to file my income taxes, was that after selecting the free option, TurboTax showed my previous year's information being slowly deleted, one-by-one, just to rub my nose into the fact that I am poor enough to have to chose the "free" option. For people in my situation, $30 is still a considerable sum.
I doubt my information was actually deleted. The amount of demographic and economic information that Intuit collects from these services is too valuable to delete. But Intuit purposefully put an animated depiction of all your data being slowly deleted just to rub salt into your impoverished wounds. Very uncouth Intuit. There are ethically better ways to market your wares than that.
After that bit of unpleasantness, I was taken to another web page where I went through the process of manually entering all the information that Intuit wanted an extra $30 just to have an algorithm automatically regurgitate my information from previous years. If another human being was doing the data entry for me, I could see reason for a small fee but when all this stuff is handled (and supposedly deleted) by an automated system, that's just gouging, in my opinion.
Several times throughout the process, TurboTax would bring up the three tier, optional fees screen, trying to milk as much money out of me as possible. I realize Intuit is trying to up-sell me on more products and services but the reason I am using the free service is because I am too poor to buy all the for-an-extra-fee stuff!
Filing income taxes is intimidating, worrisome, and frustrating enough as is without Intuit trying to bleed even more out of you.
Comments
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