New laptop?

I replaced my older, larger laptop (HDD, optical drive, etc.) with a Lenovo ideapad 330S. It has a solid-state drive (not a hard disc drive with moving parts), a good amount of storage, a reasonably fast processor, a nice screen, and a regular keyboard with a numeric keypad. The only thing it doesn't have is moving parts (no HDD nor optical drive). My wife has a late-model HP 17" with a large HDD, big screen, plenty of memory, etc... the ideapad boot/reboot about 20 times faster than her HP - all because of the solid state drive vs. the hard drive (similar processors). Being a Windows PC, it will run any of the Windows software your old one would. I couldn't be happier with it.

Rob

A Chromebook would seem to be ideal for you. As has been mentioned in another post, Credit Karma is an alternative to Tax Act and it is free, I've been using it for several years and it does the job. Chromebooks run all Google apps so Google Docs is there for writing letters, etc. Google's Gmail will handle your email including from any other email accounts and sync with your iPhone Gmail. My wife has a Chromebook which meets her needs that are very similar to yours.

I use both Windows and Chrome books... The Chrombooks are fantastic for online and that's how I do my taxes. NO computer is hacker proof but Chromebooks do have a "Restore to brand new" (Powerwash) feature. ONLY warning any saved data goes POOF. (So I save data to a removable memory card)

My latest windows device is an HP about 600 dollars at Best Buy 250 Gig SSD (Solid state hard drive) quad core... I anticipated the standard all day set up of a new windows machine took about 10 mintues or less.

The tasks you mention as desired are possible on the very cheapest of laptops. Heck, your current old PC is probably perfectly capable of serving your needs as described!

Your budget is the biggest question. An iPad would be a great choice, because it will sync with your iPhone, but APPLE products carry a premium price.

You might try loading a version of Linux (I use Mint now) on that old machine. I have a VERY old HP laptop that would barely run on Windows so I wiped the hard drive and installed the
Ubuntu version of Linux. Now that machine hums along very smoothly and I am able to do everything on it that I used to do with Windows. You can download the version you want on a thumb drive and then run it from that if you choose or you can load it into your computers drive. The install program gives you the choice.
Barney