Turbo tax is one of the easiest products to use, but because they don’t expect to make much money by doing things for free, they’re decided to hide the best option where it’s harder to get to. Here’s the deal

1. The Free Edition is free only for the federal return. If you need to file for state, you’ll pay $30 per state. *
2. The Freedom Edition is free federal, and most states are free as well. The few states that aren’t on the free efile program are still much cheaper. The only catch is, you can’t use the freedom edition unless you made $31,000 or less last year, or are active military, or qualify for the EIC. Of course, that leaves a good slice of the country free to use their freedom.

*If you have already filed for the federal, and want to file for the state, you’ll have to sign up for the freedom edition with a different email address and provide all the info all over again, but the cost difference between 0 and $30 justifies the extra effort in my mind. Just do yourself a favor, don’t skip all around. It confuses the poor program. The temptation is to skip right to the state return part, but it pulls the information you put in the federal part to fill in the state part. The program is very particular about that too. It took me an extra 15 minutes to get green lights because I did it out of order and it didn’t like me too much…but I’m used to that from computers.