I wrote a post a few weeks ago about how I owe Uncle Sam $10000 and I normally file my taxes the first week of April to leave time for rejections/corrections and payment processing. I opened up TurboTax again and something just didn’t feel right about the whole tax situation. What bothered me the most was the fact that I owed state income taxes on a rental property in a state where I usually don’t owe money or it’s a small trivial amount.
I decided to ask AI to review some things and asked it to calculate the taxes I should owe given the circumstances and it came back with a number 1/5 of what it said I should owe. I asked it to do some further digging and then it hit me! I had forgotten to take depreciation on the property which effectively eliminated the tax bill!
Not only did it eliminate $500 in state income taxes but it lowered my federal income tax by $1000 to $9000!
Yes the stupid mistake was mine and I *might* have found it on my own but AI spotted the issue instantly. I do hope that by next year one of the big AI companies will start creating “specialist” AI bots that can do my taxes entirely and I can ditch TurboTax altogether.
Because our income tends to be high, we rarely qualify for any type of credits so I got into property rentals as a way to reduce taxes and it’s worked very well which is why I was troubled in the first place with 2025’s tax returns.
Share The Wealth
Are you using AI for tax advice yet?
How did you give your tax info to AI? Did you upload your tax return PDF from TurboTax to AI, social security numbers and all?
Of course not. NEVER EVER upload your social security number or other personal info to AI (address, phone number, SSN, etc). You can use LibreOffice (free download) and edit your PDF tax return or any PDF and remove all the personal information then save it as a new file. I did this with my insurance documents. You can then upload that if you feel comfortable or you can copy snippets of your return and ask it to review it over. In my case I knew that something was off and it had to do with state income taxes because I rarely pay state income tax since the only thing that would trigger it was income in that state and the ONLY thing I had in that state was a rental property. AI saw that I had not taken depreciation and I should fix it. I don’t know why TurboTax didn’t prompt me for depreciation or skipped it entirely during the interview process.