More Tax Estimating Applets

Yesterday I was playing around the the TaxCaster utility from Intuit, and today I searched around the Web for some more web applets that help estimate a tax refund. H&R Block has a tax estimator utility. Like TaxCaster, the H&R Block utility lets you input various types of income and deductions to get a quick estimate of what your tax refund or balance due might be. I was able to input more types of deductions than with the Intuit applet, but some the deductions are lumped together in broad categories such as "other adjustments" and "other credits." Even though their interface was less intuitive at first glance, the calculations from the H&R Block tax estimator were closer to my own tax calculations than the Intuit version because I was able to enter more deductions.

There's also a tax estimator on the CCH financial planning web site. (Java needs to be installed to use this applet.) The CCH estimator provides more fields for different types of income and various deductions, it is still a quick and easy application. The tax estimate provided by CCH was within a dollar of my own calculations when I plugged in my numbers, and this indicates to me that the more data entry fields provided the more accurate the estimating tool can be.

I also found a tax estimator on the CalcXML Web site. This calculator asks for total income, IRA contribution, and total itemized deductions. There isn't a way to specify different types of income (such as business income subject to the self-employment tax) or different types of deductions. As a result, their tax estimate was way off my own calculations.