Monitoring threshold for standard deduction vs itemization

nomadintrovert

I'm not sure if this is in the correct area.

For things such as sales tax, education expenses, charitable giving or expenses relating to it, etc., does QMac have an area to display the standard deduction for this tax year? Is there a way for QMac (when things are categorized correctly) to tell us how close we are to the standard deduction and predict the likelihood of choosing it for TurboTax?

Additionally, for certain categories such as the Lifelong Learner Credit, can Quicken estimate how much of that credit I would get if I added tuition from learning such as certificate programs?

RickO

Quicken is not really designed to do this. However, if you have categorized every Schedule A eligible expense properly, then you could, in theory, easily generate a report that adds up all the eligible expenses. The problem is that on Schedule A, some groups of expenses have exclusions or limits. For example, for medical expenses there's a 7.5% exclusion and taxes are limited to $10k or $5k. I don't see an easy way to automate this within Quicken.

I think what I'd do is generate Quicken reports that total your expenses in each separate area of Schedule A. Then set up a temporary Turbotax return (using last year's TT) and switch to the forms method. Plug in your best guess of this year's AGI (using the Override option) and then manually plug in the total in each area of Schedule A. This should plop out the correct number at the bottom of schedule A which you can then compare to your standard deduction.

I'm not really familiar with the LifeLong Learning Credit, but I do see it's fairly complicated and the IRS has a tool to check eligibility here: https://www.irs.gov/help/ita/am-i-eligible-to-claim-an-education-credit You could run that tool and then potentially plug the numbers into the Turbotax return in the appropriate place.