2016 tax season: 10 important changes and tips + 10 wacky deductions

To help you get the most out of your returns, here are a few important changes for the 2016 tax year.

3. You might qualify to use free tax-prep software

Blaine Shahan/Intelligencer Journal/Lancaster New Era/AP/File
Alysha Griffin works on a laptop computer at Garden Spot High School in New Holland, Pa., November 2012.

Those with a 2016 income of $64,000 or less (more than 70 percent of taxpayers, says IRS) may qualify to complete their taxes for free. You can do this here through any of the IRS's 12 tax-software partners, such as TurboTax, H&R Block, and ezTaxReturn.com. Each software company has its own qualifying criteria, so you’ll have to do a bit of research.  Some allow select higher-earning taxpayers to use the software for free.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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