In what has to be a record, I’ve just finished filing my 2005 Federal Tax Return. It’s amazing what owning a home can do to motivate you to file that return as early as possible. That, and well, there’s that looming wedding which makes the refund check more than a nice thing.

One problem I ran into this year was that H&R Block discontinued TaxCut for the Mac. I’ve happily used that software for the last 3 years and was looking forward to using the new version this year. So, I was faced with the choice of either switching over to TurboTax or going the web route with H&R Block.

Ultimately, I chose using the online tax preparation tool, TaxCut Online Premium. A word of warning, I had trouble getting started using Safari. For some reason, I was unable to launch the application and I don’t think it was the popup blocking in Safari. I switched over to Firefox and had smooth sailing from that point on. There were some visual glitches in the interface. For example, some of the buttons seemed to only show their top half (they’re the green slivers you’ll see). I was able to get through the whole preparation interview, though, and file my federal taxes.

Overall, the online offering felt a lot like the Mac program from last year. It offered all the features I needed at a reasonable cost. The help was as robust as the desktop application and the UI made smart use of JavaScript and DHTML. I wish that they had a desktop application, but I’m sure I won’t miss it. Hopefully, filing my state returns will go as smoothly and I’ll have a successful experience with the product.

One nice thing in the report at the end of the product shows you your effective tax rate vs. what bracket you’re in. My effective tax rate was 12% lower than what it should be according to the tax schedule. Had I donated another huge chunk of money to charity (something like $8K more), I would’ve actually dropped a bracket. Something to ponder when comparing our tax brackets to those in other countries.

The Connecticut software hasn’t come out yet, but once that’s out, I’ll be done my taxes earlier than ever. Gotta love it.