Tax Time Made Easy

Should you split your pension income with your spouse? Should you carry forward your charitable donations? What 12-month period should you use for medical expense claims? TurboTax will help you make better decisions concerning your taxes. In addition, new features
– such as changeable font size and contrast – make TurboTax more legible, even for aging eyes.

Who Should Claim Pension Income?

Splitting pension income with your spouse can save you a considerable amount of money. Besides the obvious benefit of being able to shift income from the higher-earning spouse to the lower-income spouse, you may also be able to use this strategy to eliminate the clawback on Old Age Security payments.

TurboTax helps you determine if your income is eligible for splitting, walks you through how to split qualifying income, and shows you the impact on your refund or taxes owing.  Our new Pension Splitting Optimizer even shows you whose pension income it’s best to split and the optimal amount for you to split so you don’t have to make any guesses.

Just tell TurboTax about your pension income:

And TurboTax does the rest, showing you a graph of your optimal pension split and exactly how much money you’ve saved in your tax owing/refund on your income tax.

Who Should Claim Those Charitable Donations, and When?

We all know that giving is better than receiving but with charitable donations you can have both.  And the more you give, the better it gets.

The rate at which you’re able to claim your charitable donations nearly doubles for amounts over $200. So you should never claim less than $200 in charitable donations in any one tax year.

Instead, if you want to optimize your tax situation, carry forward charitable donations (for a maximum of five years) and claim them all in a year where your income is higher. You can even combine your donations together with your spouse/common-law partner and claim them all on the return of the higher-income spouse, maximizing the credit.

TurboTax makes it easy for you to claim donations to maximize these tax benefits. You can either enter all your donation claims in one field under each donor, or, if you prefer, you can enter your claims one at a time.

 

TurboTax – Your Expert Guide to Medical Expenses

The medical expenses puzzle is another great reason to use TurboTax to prepare your taxes.

TurboTax simplifies the process of claiming your medical expenses by providing answers to common medical expense questions before and during the process of entering your medical receipts, questions such as:

• Can I claim medical expenses for other people?
• How much of my medical expenses are tax deductible?
• What’s it mean to choose the best claim period?
• Why should I claim medical expenses on one return?
• What medical expenses can I claim?

Let’s take a look at exactly how TurboTax helps you sort out the mysteries of medical expenses and make the most of your medical expenses claim.

For instance, suppose you’re wondering how much of your medical expenses are tax deductible. You and your spouse have had a few medical expenses over the course of the last year, but for nothing really serious. Tallying your receipts, you see that the grand total is $1,800.

If you’re using TurboTax to complete your income tax return, you’ll encounter a screen before you go to the trouble of entering any of your medical expenses that informs you that you can’t claim medical expenses until your medical expenses reach more than 3% of your income or top $2,152 in 2013, whichever is less.

To make it even easier for you to see if it’s worthwhile entering your medical expenses on your return, TurboTax tells you how much of your income three percent is. TurboTax also points out that, generally, the spouse with the lower income should claim the medical expenses.

Then, if it’s worth claiming your medical expenses in this tax year, and you know that none of your medical expenses are subject to limitation, you can just enter the total amount of your medical receipts. It doesn’t get any easier than that!  (Of course, if some of your medical receipts are subject to limitation, or if you just prefer to do it this way, you can still choose to enter your medical receipts one at a time.)

 

Simplify and Maximize Your Tax Savings

Simplifying doing your income tax doesn’t mean running the risk of missing out on any potential tax savings.  TurboTax guarantees that you will always get your maximum refund.

So whatever your tax situation or tax questions, TurboTax can help you.

And until April 30^th CARP member save 20% on TurboTax online editions. Visit www.turbotax.ca/carp.