I am convinced the advance offer is just bait to get people to use turbotax and credit karma. Both companies are owned by intuit. So their goal here is to get people to create a Credit Karma spend account. I am in the same boat as many of you and I have read many posts from previous years where it is always the same issue year after year. After reading the vague wording of how this works and the attempts at explanations by so-called TurboTax experts, I believe this is a borderline scam. I'm sure it's all legal due to the vague fine print. I will tell you though on principle I will be leaving TurboTax after many years of loyalty. Once my refund is deposited in my credit karma spend account, after the normal waiting time instead of an advance I'm sure, I will be deleting that Credit Karma spend account as well. There are way too many free filing Services out there these days.
Basically Intuit got me and probably a lot of other people. 150 bucks to file taxes and that's without any live or after filing type support. And then they got us on the spend account as well. Most people won't take the time to close the Credit Karma spend account after receiving their refund. Even though they didn't get the advance. Highly recommend that next year everyone looks into the free filing services.
Best of luck to everyone.
