Mike's Lounge: Shopping

TurboTax Deluxe vs. Premium

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 02:23:36 GMT

I’ve been using TurboTax to file my taxes pretty much every year. Other than several minor bugs that I’ve hit every time I use it, I’ve been pretty happy. One thing that I noticed though, is that year after year the app is becoming more expensive, yet the service remains pretty much the same. Last year I paid only $10 after a discount that I got through Fidelity (if you have a Fidelity account, go to the Tax Center tab and you’ll find a link that will give you a discount). This year TurboTax Deluxe costs $19.95 after the Fidelity discount. However, the most annoying thing is that if you look at the product description you may think that you need TurboTax Premium to deal with income from investments (if you go through the “Help me choose” wizard, as soon as you tell it that you sold stocks the wizard grays out everything below Premium). This is simply not true. The Deluxe version deals with income from investments pretty well (it asks you to enter all your sales, or lets you import it directly from your brokerage). The only thing that you don’t get is automatic pre-filling of cost basis, something that is most likely provided by your brokerage on the 1099-INT form anyway. So the bottom line is that there’s no clear advantage of TurboTax Premium over TurboTax Deluxe.

New meaning of "all"

Mon, 25 Dec 2006 06:25:20 GMT

I was just shopping on Overstock, and realized that they redefined the meaning of the word "all". Overstock has a pretty prominent ad on the front page advertising "Free shipping on all products". However, when I was about to purchase a book Overstock wanted to charge me $1.40 for shipping, so I went back to the ad, and quickly discovered that "all" doesn't mean "Books, Music, Movies & Games". I hope they don't sell the dictionaries used by their marketing staff.

Gift Cards

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 20:02:15 GMT

Analysts pretty much proclaimed gift cards as the hottest item of this holiday season: as many as 74% of consumers are expected to buy a gift card. But nobody talks about the fact that gift cards are the most evil present out there. I got at least 6 gift cards from other people within the past two years. 4 of these gift cards expired before I used them. 1 store went bankrupt before I got to shop there, and I had to try really hard to use the last gift card (my wallet is pretty big as it is, so I never carried the card with me, until I decorated my whole apt with post-its reminding me to take the gift card the next time I shop at the store). So although gift-cards are the easiest gift to buy, they are pure waste of money. I’d rather get cash than a gift card ;)