Home office: Enter real estate property taxes page issue - itemized or not

[Gary-xxx]

I'm on Business/Home Office/Enter real estate taxes: It says "if you paid real estate taxes but are not itemizing deductions, do not enter here, enter as excess real estate taxes later". HOWEVER I DON'T KNOW IF I AM ITEMIZING OR NOT YET! YOU - the PROGRAM - determines that later! So how am I suppose to decide? ALSO: I entered $2000 here in December when I was estimating where i was ... I now changed that to 0 and entered the right amount under Excess Real Estate taxes... $1940. BUT later under Personal for my home it says $1641 and when I hit UPDATE (grayed out) it is STILL showing $2000 for real estate taxes paid!!!!! I CAN'T change it!!!!! I'M STUCK and its 4/12!!!

[ThomasM125]

You can look at your form 1040 to see what your itemized deductions are. If you don't have enough to itemize, you will see the standard deduction amount on line 11(a) (normally $24,400 married or $12,200 single.) You can see your form 1040 while in the program as follows:

1. Find the "Tax Tools" option on your left menu bar and click on it

2. Click on "Tools"

3. Click on "View Tax Summary"

4. On the left menu bar see the option "Preview my 1040" and click on it to view form 1040 and schedule 1 to 3

I'd have to look at your tax return to see what is going on with your property taxes. However, sometimes the summary screen will not update when you change numbers in the program, so you may have the correct number in the program even is a summary screen number indicates otherwise.

You will have the opportunity to review your entire tax return before you submit your tax return to be filed.

[Gary-xxx]

With all due respect, and thank you for the reply, the whole reason why someone has a program like this is to allow one to enter data - and have the program decide! I did get ahold of someone from TT, on Sunday nonetheless, and between us we worked it out. But one should not have to guess at an answer and then remember to go back and check when its all done! The user knows the value for property tax - the program can and should do with that number as needed for the lowest tax implications - period. As a minimum it is ridiculous to have a statement "if you are not going to itemize don't enter the property tax here, rather enter it in excess property tax" ... he agreed this is an unanswerable question for the user as, at this point, the user has no clue whether or not he'll qualify for itemizing! Additionally when I said I need to enter it in "excess" he said and I quote "that is very rare" ... however since one doesn't know - its a crap shoot where you enter it!!