The problem is actually worse than others have indicated here. Yes, it's now Feb. 18, and TurboTax still hasn't finalized the form that it said would be done on Feb. 17. So I still can't file my taxes. And no one has any reliable estimate of whether or when the form will be finalized.
But TurboTax also gets the math wrong. The online interview assumes that the only way to calculate a mortgage's average balance for the year is to take an average of the starting and final balances. But IRS Publication 936 for 2021, which has been ready since early December, makes clear on page 13 that there are other choices. One of them is to take an average of balances for each month of the year.
That matters quite a bit if you sold one house and bought another in 2021, and had two mortgages, each for only part of the year. In my case, the difference between those two methods works out to about $5,000 in allowable interest deduction.
Now I'm left deciding whether to try to rig the online interview to get the result I want on the forms, and overcome TurboTax's form-not-finalized glitch, or ask for a refund for the fee I've already paid, and try the IRS's free fillable forms online.
