I normally uninstall the prior year's Turbo Tax before installing the latest version. I make sure I have the returns saved first.
My question is...Is there a reason to uninstall first? For or against?
To me it seems like good housekeeping to uninstall but of course you can't access the return through the program if you do.
Any and all comments would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
I usually keep the last 3 year on my computer for easy reference, but I do a fair amount of stock trading. I also find it helpful to reference IRA conversions to Roth and that type of stuff. I never had any problems. In fact I keep Taxcut and TurboTax both since I often find they give different results especially if you happen to have very much foreign Tax credits to follow.
When I was audited several years ago, I had an error on my return, but the IRS audit team had about three errors on their audit. I had to recalculate my two year old tax return, I was glad that I had the older version of TurboTax installed. I was able to make the changes on an amended return and send a check with my response to their audit. This reduced the penalty significantly.
I keep old versions installed. I also save a PDF version of my submitted return. I've used that when applying for a loan. I also use the prior year PDF return, while completing my current taxes.
Keeping old files and programs costs nothing but a little disk space, and disk space is really cheap.
-- Jim
Hi, Zipp.
I agree. To me, good housekeeping seems the only reason to uninstall. With today's low cost of large HDDs, I've not been motivated to delete the prior years' files. All my prior program and data files for the past decade total just 1 GB of space.
The past few years' TurboTax programs are still on my computer. They are not in the Program Files folder tree, but in a folder, E:\TurboTax, which I created in my "neutral" (no OS installed on it) Drive E:, alongside E:\QuickenW. TurboTax for 2009 is installed in E:\TurboTax\Tax09, alongside Tax08, Tax07, etc. The tax data is in E:\TurboTax\Tax09Dat, etc.
If I need to review my 2008 return, I don't have to re-install the prior program first. Since I'm the only user of my computer, neither the program nor the data is encrypted or heavily protected; those files are included in my sporadic backups onto removable storage.
My E:\TurboTax folder looks more complete than it actually is, with folders all the way back to Tax00. Since I'm often a beta tester, various Windows versions have been installed, deleted and reinstalled several time and I haven't bothered to re-install TurboTax for 2000, for example, recently. The files are still here on my HDD, but I'd need to run that Setup file again to let it recreate the entries it needs in my current Registry before I could actually run the program and review my 2000 data with it; I won't go to that trouble until/unless I need to.
RC
FWIW I've used Taxcut (now H&R Block At Home) w/Quicken since TY1996 and never bothered uninstalling any version of T/C. I've left them all installed for no other reason than I wasn't compelled to remove them (space has never been an issue); and on random occasions I brought up some version from the past because I was at the computer and didn't want to get up and go fetch the paper copies. I've also downloaded and saved all updates so I could rebuild an installation if I ever wanted to. YMMV
BeanSmart website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.