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Uber and Lyft Taxes – How to use TurboTax to File Your Taxes

Simon Kwok

Uber and Lyft Taxes – How to use TurboTax to File Your Taxes

So now that everyone has a 1099 or some kind of income summary from Uber, Lyft and Sidecar, now its time to file your taxes! This will be a tenuous time for some drivers as they will either be finding out how much taxes they have to pay or how much of a refund you may be getting, depending on how much you already payed with estimated taxes.

For additional tax resources from Rideshare Dashboard, check out my newly launched online course for Uber, Lyft and Sidecar Taxes! This course will also include a longer video showing you how to fully use TurboTax to list your income.

Here are some other posts about 1099s and Estimated Taxes:

You can get TurboTax from Amazon with my referral link here (Note: I get a few pennies from anyone who goes through the link and purchase a copy of TurboTax so thanks for the support!). Read the rest of the post to see which versions to get.

If you want to get started with tax preparation for free, you can start at TurboTax online for free:

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TurboTax Deluxe (Not quite enough for Rideshare Drivers)

I have been using Turbotax for about a decade now and am pretty familiar with the personal income section. I have dealt with the self employment section last year because I earned a few hundred dollars from Uber and Lyft. Now it seems quite a few drivers are trying to use TurboTax to file their taxes. I would only recommend they go this route if they are just listing their income and then taking the standard mileage deduction. If you are looking to do anything else, you may want to seek professional help. I will show you how you can deduct expenses and depreciate your car in the Home and Business version of the software, but you need to know what you’re doing in order to do it correctly. I showed it in the below Youtube video to give you an idea of whats involved but I wouldn’t recommend anyone doing this on their own.

So here is my first video on using TurboTax Deluxe. Once I started using it, I quickly found out it was inadequate for most Uber, Lyft, Sidecar Drivers as there is no official way to enter in your 1099-K and also doesn’t allow you to list income and deductions over $200. There is a loophole you can exploit in that you can list all your income under 1099-MISC, but again, you can’t list deductions, which can cost you thousands of dollars. You can make it work if you didn’t earn a whole lot of money, but you’re leaving money on the table if you try to use TurboTax Deluxe.

For those who have TurboTax Deluxe 2015, you can get a free copy of HR Block Deluxe for free by emailing in your receipt of TurboTax Deluxe. I got my download code in 3 business days: http://newsroom.hrblock.com/hr-block-offers-free-software-turbotax-users/

Here is how you can use TurboTax Deluxe (with the caveats above).

TurboTax Home and Business

Below is the video I made for TurboTax Home and Business. So this software is much more capable and can handle all the deductions. However, it does cost quite a bit more than Deluxe. I bought it for the sake of making a video to show you how to do it, but personally I would have stuck with HR Block Deluxe to do my taxes as I’m not a big fan of the cost increase to file my Schedule C for the deductions in Home and Business.

This video will show you how to navigate through the self employment income section of Turbotax while highlighting the various deductions you may be able to list. Note that you can only deduct what you have good records of. Making up records now may not help you in an audit as records need a level of specificity and detail that you may not be able to provide now.

Have more questions about Uber or Lyft? Head on over to our Rideshare Driver Training Course! Driver Promotions
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