robin1234

I always do our tax the old-fashioned way, pen and pencil, paper forms, calculator when needed.

1040 was dead easy this year, since there were no substantial changes from 2019 to 2020 in our personal income situation. So I’m about to mail the 1040 to the IRS, they owe us a few hundred dollars.

New York is always dead easy - just transfer a few figures from the 1040 to the NY form, then take our NY deductions, and we never owe any NY tax at all (we are retired, and NY tax regime is extremely friendly to retired people on low to moderate incomes.) I printed off the IT-201, NY tax form, compared it to last years .. it is exactly the same! So far, so good.

Then, just to double check, I looked at the “what’s new” section in the IT-201 instructions.

Oh dear. From March 2020, New York income tax is “decoupled” from the federal tax code. So any changes to your federal tax as a result of new changes to the federal tax code, you have to undo via a new form. One big example, starting in 2020, you can take a deduction for charitable donations, even if you use the standard deduction. But NY doesn’t recognize this new IRS provision - so you have to undo it in your NY taxes. Hey thanks, Albany, for yet another tax form and a new complication!

https://proconnect.intuit.com/taxpro...-need-to-know/

MMcD

Bummer

Good reason to use Turbo Tax - it picks up any changes and saves you lots of time. Well worth worth the few bucks it costs
Glad you caught the change before filing

vespucci

I used to do my tax returns on paper, but didn't find the instructions user-friendly. There would be something like: "If line xx is equal to or more than line xx, subtract line xx from line xx. Then go to line xx of the next column. Otherwise, go to line xx..", and I'd spend a lot of time going through it, getting lost as to its purpose, only to realize later that I could have left it out as it only made a difference for a particular, small category of taxpayers- but of course there was nothing in the instructions to indicate this. I doubt if form-filling will become more user-friendly now that most people e-file. I e-file now (not with Turbotax but with another provider); my IRS return is free and I only pay a small amount for my state return.

robin1234

This is very true. If I was using TurboTax or similar, I wouldn’t even have to be aware of the new NY provision - TT would have simply done the extra calculation and generated the new form. But in a sense, that’s why I like to keep doing it manually. I’m sure I heard about the new tax regime on the radio news months ago, and simply didn’t listen, because I was concentrating on Trump, Cuomo, Covid, Amy Covid Superspreader, whatever. Now I’m reading about it because it is news that affects me, so I’m somewhat in control .. I’m an informed citizen!
Absolutely. I’ve come to the conclusion that doing those “worksheets” in the 1040 instruction book is the worst. For a few years, I laboriously did the one that addressed the Alternative Minimum Tax - and eventually realized that no way was AMT aimed at taxpayers like me.

tom169

I use Turbotax to prepare all of the forms and then I review it line by line before e-filing. I feel that is the best of both worlds.

robin1234

Agreed. Over the last many years, I’ve used TurboTax twice. The first time it pissed me off - one of the reasons for trying it was to do Oklahoma tax for my daughter. TurboTax had no idea about Oklahoma tax, so I pretty much had to do all the work myself (this must have been about twenty years ago.) The second time, TurboTax taught me about qualified dividends, which I previously knew nothing about (so we’d always paid full tax on dividends.) So that was a really useful learning experience.