Instead of spending your refund on merchant cards using the TurboTax Tax Refund Bonus Program, consider doing an IRA, paying off credit card, debt and applying the refund to your mortgage principal.

Users of TurboTax will find that Intuit has entered into an alliance with leading merchants. If you are going to get a tax refund, the program allows you to spread your money across a large variety of merchant spending cards. The draw here is that it is at a discount. In other words, you're able to get a $50 merchant card for $40. The screen shot below gives you an idea of the merchants participating in the TurboTax Tax Refund Bonus Program.

What you should be doing with the tax refund instead
You should consider the TurboTax Tax Refund Bonus Program only after you have done the following:

1. Taken out the maximum amount for an Individual Retirement Account,
2. Paid off or down that credit card debt,
3. Paid off or down your student loan,
4. Invested in your child's education account, and
5. Applied your refund towards the principal of your mortgage.

What Intuit should be doing instead
We think that Intuit, the company behind TurboTax should also be trying to educate consumers in better money management. In fact, the four items in the above list should be a part of the bonus plan. We're sure that there is no shortage of merchants who would want to sign up for a program that allows tax payers to them. It would be really cool if while in TurboTax, you could automatically take funds out of your refund and set up an IRA account/child's educational account or send money to your credit card company, mortgage provider, or , etc.

Intuit also has a responsibility to educate consumers to make better decisions financing their money.

• It certainly has the products to do it: Quicken for money management,
• Quick Books for small business accounting in desktop and on line versions, and
• PayTrust for Comprehensive Bill Management.

When using TurboTax, Intuit does ask users if they want to buy the Quicken Software at a discount. That's not enough though. We think that the discount should be higher and that Intuit should be offering a deeper discount if customers buy the a package either Quicken, TurboTax and PayTrust or Quicken, Quick Books, TurboTax and PayTrust.

If you are interested in a good bill payer, we did a review of PayTrust several years ago. While the review was critical of the design, we still use PayTrust. While dated it is still applicable. We plan on updating our PayTrust review soon.