I've been using TurboTax for the past 4 years and I must say the 2020 TurboTax has had the worst quality issues and glitches. The support as well when these glitches/issues are brought up on the discussion forums is met with complicated work arounds, or no viable solution, instead of having the software fixed at the next few updates.
- Intuit, if you are monitoring, please address these issues for the 2021 tax year or you will loose out on loyal users.
- Community, please add to this discussion to let Intuit know the issues you had with the software this year. And the work around you had to go through to resolve it.
My Main Issues:
1) TurboTax does not recognize multiple refinances for a single property properly. If you add each individual refinance, the software adds up all the "initial loan values" to come up with your total loan. It ignores that you noted that the previous loans were paid off.
Ex: Loan 1: Initial value $300k final value at end of year: $0 (due to refinance)
Refinance #1: Initial value $250k final value at end of year: $0 (due to refinance)
Refinance #2: Initial value $260k final value at end of year: $255k
In the above example, TurboTax assumed my total loan value is $810k (300+250+260) and phases
me out for the mortgage interest since the loan value is above $750k (per IRS rules).
The work around is to consolidate all my loans as one single loan with a initial value of $300k and final value of $255k and add all the interest and taxes paid over the three loans. TurboTax could easily be programed to do this for us since it already asks beginning and end value of loan at end of year.
2) California State does not recognize Canadian RRSPs as a valid retirement vehicle, so those of us with RRSPs need to declare the unrealized gains of our RRSPs and get taxed on it (yay!). TurboTax upon initial step-by-step procedure has the option to input our RRSP gains. Once we input it, the option to review/edit our election disappears completely from the program. The only way to get the option back is to start a new return. Workaround is to review the return in the "Forms" view and find the applicable form to see where the RRSP gains were declared to confirm. For the laymen, we don't know what forms to look at, let alone know how to fix an issue ... that is why we bought TurboTax in the first place.
3) A feature that is not available, but should be, is to have TurboTax tell us what our tax liability is for each investment property we declare. I'd like to know how much taxes I owe/get refund due to rental income/expenses inputted for each of my properties individually so I know to much to take out/put back into each appropriate bank rental account. Currently the only way to figure it out is to manually keep an eye on the federal/state refund score on top of the screen and see how much it changes after you input each properties income/expenses.
