Playing the rebate game to get tax software free
So every year in January - April, various retailers that sell software offer promotions on tax preparation software: TurboTax and TaxCut. I’ve been pretty loyal to TaxCut as it’s usually the cheaper of the two and by most accounts just as effective. One year I tried TurboTax because of its ability to import Quicken data (TurboTax and Quicken are both produced by Intuit). There was a glitch in importing my Quicken data resulting in some duplicate entries, after communicating with support the only fix was to remove all the imported Quicken data effectively rendering this feature useless. The next year TurboTax had the fiasco with their spyware activation software, so I’m glad I switched back to TaxCut.
I live in Massachusetts which has a sufficiently convoluted tax code to necessitate software for preparation of that return as well. In the past purchasing TaxCut for Federal + State taxes has involved rebates on TaxCut itself, this is no more. You buy TaxCut Federal + State for ~$39.99 and you are done with it. But then there is all the free after rebate software to go along with it, which varies by retailer. The trick is to use that software as padding to get your order eligible for a large coupon code.
Here’s what I did at Staples: Buy TaxCut Premium Federal + State for $34.99, Microsoft Money Deluxe for $40, Norton Antivirus 2008 for $39.99, and McAfee Virusscan Plus for 39.99.
Total: $154.97. Go to Ebay and buy a $30 of $150 Staples coupon for $2.15 and 3 $3 ink coupons for $3.06. Total after coupons: $115.97. Total rebates: $120, which pays the bill and nearly pays for the Ebay coupons.
Now you actually have to take the time to fill out all the rebates but it shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes to do all 5 rebates. You might notice that 2 of the rebates are “upgrade” rebates, meaning you need to have either 1. previous years version or 2. competitors verson. Since you bought both Symantec and McAfee products, simply send a photocopy of the other softwares CD to each rebate. You could also send the front page of the manual but they don’t seem to come with manual’s any more so good luck with that…
