6 ms·

Regardless of what happens to Direct File, I recommend people learn how to do their tax returns by hand. I do it by hand every year. Yes, it is tedious, but I

Regardless of what happens to Direct File, I recommend people learn how to do their tax returns by hand. I do it by hand every year. Yes, it is tedious, but I am not beholden to anyone and I don't need a "product" (paid or otherwise) to solve it for me. It takes me between 10 to 15 hours per year for both my federal and state tax returns. That is all. Once you get a hang of it, it is not that bad. (I recognize that not everyone can do this, but if you have the technical skill to handle the math, I do still recommend it.)

SoftTalker 2y ago
I do the same thing. There's a free spreadsheet that is a great help, you can search for it.
- em3rgent0rdr 2y ago
  The government should just write its tax law as a spreadsheet.
vel0city 2y ago
10-15 hours? Turbo Tax usually costs me like $50 or so after discounts through my bank and I can nail out my taxes in under an hour with all it can auto-import in my situations. If it saves me 14 hours of labor its definitely worth $50 to me, and I'd say I'm massively overpaying compared to the free filing tools out there! It shouldn't be this hard.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  The cost of Turbo Tax is not the just what you pay for the service. The real cost is that they now have a very detailed financial picture of you and your family and they will market that to any willing buyer (I will never be convinced that they don't do this).
  - atrettel 2y ago
    This is one of the big reasons I keep doing it manually. Only the IRS and my state gets my info.
    - lantry 2y ago
      and Elon musk, apparently
      - leoh 2y ago
        Unclear to me if satire or not; it seems entirely plausible that he and the team are exfiltrating data
    - vel0city 2y ago
      And your bank, and your credit card company, and the company handling payroll, and your health insurance company, and credit bureaus, and and and and...
      - bloomingeek 2y ago
        You could always go live in the woods or a cave, eating berries. :)
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        Yes, the people paying you and the ones handling your money has your financial data. You can always choose to go bank less and credit card less of you wish. I guess you can go off grid for salary?
  - yesco 2y ago
    I regret to inform you that your bank, credit card company and every other financial institution you use is already selling it off in real time... it's how they make credit reports :(
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
- hedora 2y ago
  If you can get through turbotax in under an hour (and are able to use their $50 version!) you probably can do it by hand in under two. Hint: If nothing changed year-to-year, just look at last year’s tax return. It is probably a 1040-EZ, and all you have to do is copy this year’s numbers from whatever documents turbotax copied them from last year. Then, read the directions for the form and do the arithmetic. At some point in a few years, this will stop working, and you’ll probably overpay by thousands. Anyway, it took me well over three hours to use turbotax this year, which is faster than most. An hour of that was reverse-engineering their calculation error which made my refund too high, and certainly would have triggered a sternly worded demand for more money and a fine (or worse) from the IRS. I know this because they made another error a few years ago, and it cost me 16 hours on hold with the IRS and thousands of dollars. Having said that, I’d have overpaid a few thousand this year and spent at least 8 hours doing it by hand. On the bright side, if Trump succeeds in burning the federal government down, maybe a simpler tax code (like the rest of the first world has) will emerge from the ashes of the IRS. If not, then he won’t be president any more. So, at least it’s not 100% bad. Edit: I just noticed you’re using auto-import! If that’s saving you time, you’re making a big mistake. Intuit doesn’t reliably save all the documents you’ll need when the IRS sends you a nasty letter. Go manually download as many of them as you can, and file them for 7 years.
  - singron 2y ago
    1040-EZ was discontinued in 2018. You just fill out 1040 now and leave lines blank. If you only have W2 income and don't make too much, it is really easy. You just fill out lines 1a, 12, 25a and the IRS will figure the rest (you can calculate the intermediate numbers if you want to, but they will do it for you). However, knowing it's that easy requires reading a lot of instructions, and if you make enough money (depending on filing status), it suddenly gets much more complicated (forms 8959, 8960, 6251 have income triggers), and if you have 1099s (INT or DIV) you might need to file Schedule B and form 8995. And if you have a mortgage, you should do your taxes twice to see if itemizing with Schedule A is better. And god forbid you sold anything and have to do Schedule D and forms 8949.
  - pastage 2y ago
    I do not understand you guys, I do not care about my taxes. They are fairly complex by Swedish Standards because I deliberately loose money In some area that gives me tax cuts, but not overly so. Every year I get a digital form to sign from the tax office, I pay residual taxes and send it in all digital. This takes me in totalt 20 minutes including everything. Everything is prepared for me all I have to do is check if everything is correct. I can not fathom even copying those numbers correctly from diffrent sources in under an hour. I do not want to do my taxes. I just want to be informed so I can double check and pay them. Spending an hour doing taxes seems crazy ineffective .
- atrettel 2y ago
  If paying for TurboTax works for you, that's great. If you find it worth the money, that's great. It's just not worth it for me and wanted to tell people there is another way. I never said it is hard. Slow and tedious, but not hard. I take my time. I probably could speed it up, but I usually listen to music while I do it and try not to stress myself out about it.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  The cost of giving money to Intuit is that they then give it to politicians to create a more convoluted tax return so that you are further locked into giving Intuit money every year.
  - zugi 2y ago
    I realize you're just repeating frequently reported information, and Intuit has indeed lobbied against the IRS creating a free competitor to their product. But Intuit has not lobbied to make taxes more complicated. Congress does that well enough on its own. If you reread the original ProPublica piece that kicked off all the Intuit-hate 6 years ago, you'll see they imply it but carefully don't actually say it or back it up; others quoting the article were less careful.
- mandeepj 2y ago
  > Turbo Tax usually costs me like $50 You may not have Rental income and Stocks to report
kamranjon 2y ago
Would love to read a blog post on this. 10 - 15 hours is probably too much but I bet if I learned how to do it I could figure out how to optimize it with all the tools that are available today. Would love if TurboTax just died because everyone figured out they could do taxes on their own with just a little supplemental help from local models or something similar.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  If you just have W2 income and take the standard deduction, taxes are really quite simple to do on paper. It's a two page form, most of which you leave blank. If you have self-employment income, business income, capital gains, 401k distributions, HSAs, 529 plans, etc. it can get complicated but at that point TurboTax honestly doesn't help all that much (unless it's gotten a lot better since I last used it). If you get to the point that your taxes are too complicated to do by hand you probably need an accountant anyway.
  - fooker 2y ago
    > at that point TurboTax honestly doesn't help all that much It does. I have most the things you have mentioned and it was automated, except for correcting a small situation their OCR messed up by reading an extra blank space from the form.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      Well that's good to know I guess. I haven't used it since they could OCR forms. I had to key them in manually, and it really didn't do anything much more than a standard 1040 return and the most common additional schedules.
- simonsaysso 2y ago
  10-15 hours is NUTS. I do mine by hand every year and I can get them done in about 3 hours. I would say my taxes are nontrivial thought certainly not super complicated (no K1s)
- 2y ago
2muchcoffeeman 2y ago
Do you have a more complicated return eg other income, investments, etc or is this the average of how long it takes? That’s insane.
- atrettel 2y ago
  I don't have a particularly complicated return, to be honest. I just take my time and don't stress myself out about it. The time includes everything, not just the time I spent putting in numbers. You may find it insane, but I'm OK with it. I'm not going to knock somebody for doing something different, but I do think it is important to know how to do it yourself when push comes to shove.
- singron 2y ago
  I'm not OP, but if you are a reasonably high-earning professional common on this site, you trigger a ton of stuff. I used to take about that long to do mine, although I've gotten much faster. In a normal year, I typically file forms 1040, Schedule A, Schedule B, Schedule D, Schedule 2, 6251, 8606, 8949, 8959, 8960, 8995 + state versions of some of those. I'm also married, so I calculate all permutations of joint/separate with itemized/non-itemized, which also requires you to actually figure your taxes instead of leaving it blank and letting the IRS do it. It gets really complicated very quickly, but if you are single, have less income, and it's only from wages, it's much simpler.
  - atrettel 2y ago
    Yes, you are right. In hindsight, what I viewed as "complicated" is not what everyone else views as complicated. Because I do this manually, I am much more aware of all of the different forms and roughly when to use them than most other people, so I don't view my taxes as particular complicated because I can see situations where they can get insanely more complicated. I filed more than just form 1040 with the IRS this year if anyone is curious. As to the permutations aspect, this does take a lot of time but it can net a lot of savings. One thing that I would add is that you do have the choice to round to the cent or the whole dollar (at least with the IRS), but generally I have never found that to make any substantial difference, so I just round to whole dollars at this point and don't waste my time trying to optimize that.
tombert 2y ago
I have the technical skill to handle the math, but there is no way that I'm spending fifteen hours to do my taxes when there's a free-to-low-cost thing readily available that will do a similar or better job in like 45 minutes. I used CashApp taxes this year, and I liked it. It was actually free and it didn't do any upsell in the process.
zingerlio 2y ago
I second this. Although I only hand filed for two years and then transitioned to FreeTaxUSA. The benefit is that after going through their wizard/interface, I can confidently check the generated IRS forms to make sure it’s filled to my intent.
- IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago
  big thumbs up to freetaxusa
- atkailash 2y ago
  [dead]
whyenot 2y ago
It took me 58 minutes to do my not that simple taxes (both state and federal) using Turbo Tax. The cost was about $200. Based on your time estimate, it saved me 1-2 work days of time. That seems like a good bargain to me. What I don't like with Intuit is the sleazy ways they try to upsell you and to trick you into allowing them to use your financial information for non-tax purposes.
- beej71 2y ago
  What sounds better to me is spending 58 minutes and $0. Seems like a better bargain.
- chneu 2y ago
  Mine took the same time and only cost $15 because my state charges. Freetaxusa. I could have done it for free if I mailed my state, but whatever. My taxes are also well above what's average(personal plus 2 biz). TurboTax is a rip off. There are dozens of free websites that do the same thing: ask you a handful of questions and fill out a spreadsheet/form. $200 is mind bogglingly expensive for doing it yourself. TurboTax does nothing that dozens of other FREE services don't also do. It's just a few questions.
neilv 2y ago
Your mileage may vary. I did taxes by hand for a few years, probably 20+ hours each year, every hour stressful. For example, at some point, I'm fatigued and surprised how much work it was thus far, but I think I can see the finish line on the horizon, but then one line in a form triggers a cascade of additional schedules and many more hours. Then, finally, the federal forms are done, and it's a stack... And the state forms are somehow not just a 1-pager of quickly copying key numbers from federal 1040, but seem (subjectively) to more than double the work, and produce a second stack. The last 2 tax years, I decided it was a really unhealthy amount of stress, so I've bought TurboTax Home & Business. I run it in a KVM instance that gets airgapped, on principle, so my data doesn't get sent to corporate surveillance capitalism HQ. Though I don't assume that TurboTax in airgapped VM will keep working every year. But, hopefully, before they inevitably break it some year, and I'd have to do taxes by hand again, I will be killed by a crocodile.
- fooker 2y ago
  > TurboTax in airgapped VM Just use their website, pick your battles. The government is going to use software to process your stuff anyway, and whatever contractor makes that software will sell it to TurboTax.
chickenzzzzu 2y ago
This is equivalent to compiling every package from source for your Linux install. You don't end up learning too many useful things, all you've done is a very repetitive tedious task that doesn't give you much financial return.
- atrettel 2y ago
  Well, I've previously used Gentoo, so I don't view that as scary to be honest.
  - remram 2y ago
    Gentoo automates the repetitive tedious task, you just have to wait a while.
  - oblio 2y ago
    The description above is Linux From Scratch, not Gentoo :-)
- sanderjd 2y ago
  Yep. Might be worth doing once. But not twice.
fooker 2y ago
It's easy if you just have W2 income. If you have multiple brokerage accounts, RSUs from an employer or two, maybe some consulting income, etc, it's annoying and tedious. And if you have a business, doing it by hand basically means you'll overpay by a good extent.
kazinator 2y ago
I do my (Canadian) taxes by hand also, but not exactly. I calculate all the fields using my homebrew software. All calculations are done there. The software produces a report which is organized by form and field. I can go through it and just put the indicated values into the right forms. The forms are fillable PDFs. I copy and paste most of the values. The last few years, I had perfect results; no correction came back from the Canada Revenue Agency. This year, that d1ckhead Justin Trudeau left us with a surprise; complications to the Canada Pension Plan. Something like a 40% of all the line items in my tax calculation are from the new CPP schedule 5. It has multiple brackets now. I had to redo that section of my system (redefine the model). That is tedious. Anything same as last year is a breeze. I had to model a whole new form this year since I worked for two employers and overpaid EI (employment insurance). The common forms handle CPP overpayment. For EI overpayment there is no "heads up" in the workflow at all. Since there is a deduction for EI payments, you have to do it right; you can easily screw up and naively calculate and claim the overpayment, while keeping the deduction calculated from the the overpaid amount. Anyway, when I used to work with just pen and calculator, it took me about, oh, a bit over an hour or so. 10 to 15 hours seems crazy for personal tax. Is this for a moderately complicated corporation, where you're saving money by not hiring an accountant?
chneu 2y ago
10-15 hours is insane. What are you doing? I do my personal, my 2 LLCs in under 2 hours. I also do my roommates W2 which takes 10 minutes. The whole thing costs like $35. Seriously, how does it take you 10+ hours? I do not understand at all. Lol
chrismcb 2y ago
Why? Why do you recommend it? What does one gain by doing it themselves?
DeepYogurt 2y ago
I file my own too, but we live in 2025 though. We deserve some civility
furyofantares 2y ago
Excellent advertisement for turbo tax. Luckily there's lots of more normal replies to this.
gostsamo 2y ago
There is an old russian tv series called Kitchen where the mc starts his job by stripping the labels from bananas. On the question "what is the sense of that", he gets the answer "for balance in the universe - somewhere there, there is someone else putting the labels on the bananas". Spending 15 hours on filling data that the government mostly knows and can calculate is exactly one of those balancing acts of the universe that nobody needs.
yoyohello13 2y ago
My greatest pet peeve in life is when people make ME work to pay THEM money. I don’t understand why the gov can’t just tell me how much I owe and I pay.
- gblargg 2y ago
  You'll first need to give them access to all your private financial transactions. I'm a fan of the 5th amendment.
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    They already have access to your employer, Bank, and brokerage accounts. I would guess that covers most of what they need for most people anyway.
wyclif 2y ago
Maybe I'm just out of touch because I haven't done taxes by hand for years, but 10 to 15 hours? After I read your first sentence, I seriously expected you to say 2-3 hours. I don't doubt that it really takes that long for you. I just think it's ridiculous that anyone should spend that amount of time on something that should be a lot more simple, streamlined, and efficient.
gblargg 2y ago
Free tax programs are what allow taxes to become so complex that you need a program (or paid CPA) to help fill them out. I refuse to have to get a program to fill them out. A big benefit of filling out yourself is knowing how to minimize the tax burden. Using a program or CPA you never really understand how tax is calculated and the tax consequences of various financial choices you make throughout the year.
beej71 2y ago
I recommend this, as well, especially if you have repetitive taxes. I spend just a few hours doing taxes by hand when it's are similar to the previous year. With an accountant, I have to spend a bunch of time getting things ready, anyway. I only pay them when something weird happens. Also, fuck Intuit.
bigfatkitten 2y ago
My Australian tax return takes me about 20 minutes. The system prefills 99% of the details that they've obtained from my employer, bank, health insurer, stock broker etc directly. All I need to do is fill out my deductions from a running spreadsheet I've maintained throughout the year.

SoftTalker 2y ago

I do the same thing. There's a free spreadsheet that is a great help, you can search for it.

em3rgent0rdr 2y ago
The government should just write its tax law as a spreadsheet.

vel0city 2y ago

10-15 hours? Turbo Tax usually costs me like $50 or so after discounts through my bank and I can nail out my taxes in under an hour with all it can auto-import in my situations. If it saves me 14 hours of labor its definitely worth $50 to me, and I'd say I'm massively overpaying compared to the free filing tools out there! It shouldn't be this hard.

SoftTalker 2y ago
The cost of Turbo Tax is not the just what you pay for the service. The real cost is that they now have a very detailed financial picture of you and your family and they will market that to any willing buyer (I will never be convinced that they don't do this).
- atrettel 2y ago
  This is one of the big reasons I keep doing it manually. Only the IRS and my state gets my info.
  - lantry 2y ago
    and Elon musk, apparently
    - leoh 2y ago
      Unclear to me if satire or not; it seems entirely plausible that he and the team are exfiltrating data
  - vel0city 2y ago
    And your bank, and your credit card company, and the company handling payroll, and your health insurance company, and credit bureaus, and and and and...
    - bloomingeek 2y ago
      You could always go live in the woods or a cave, eating berries. :)
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      Yes, the people paying you and the ones handling your money has your financial data. You can always choose to go bank less and credit card less of you wish. I guess you can go off grid for salary?
- yesco 2y ago
  I regret to inform you that your bank, credit card company and every other financial institution you use is already selling it off in real time... it's how they make credit reports :(
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
hedora 2y ago
If you can get through turbotax in under an hour (and are able to use their $50 version!) you probably can do it by hand in under two. Hint: If nothing changed year-to-year, just look at last year’s tax return. It is probably a 1040-EZ, and all you have to do is copy this year’s numbers from whatever documents turbotax copied them from last year. Then, read the directions for the form and do the arithmetic. At some point in a few years, this will stop working, and you’ll probably overpay by thousands. Anyway, it took me well over three hours to use turbotax this year, which is faster than most. An hour of that was reverse-engineering their calculation error which made my refund too high, and certainly would have triggered a sternly worded demand for more money and a fine (or worse) from the IRS. I know this because they made another error a few years ago, and it cost me 16 hours on hold with the IRS and thousands of dollars. Having said that, I’d have overpaid a few thousand this year and spent at least 8 hours doing it by hand. On the bright side, if Trump succeeds in burning the federal government down, maybe a simpler tax code (like the rest of the first world has) will emerge from the ashes of the IRS. If not, then he won’t be president any more. So, at least it’s not 100% bad. Edit: I just noticed you’re using auto-import! If that’s saving you time, you’re making a big mistake. Intuit doesn’t reliably save all the documents you’ll need when the IRS sends you a nasty letter. Go manually download as many of them as you can, and file them for 7 years.
- singron 2y ago
  1040-EZ was discontinued in 2018. You just fill out 1040 now and leave lines blank. If you only have W2 income and don't make too much, it is really easy. You just fill out lines 1a, 12, 25a and the IRS will figure the rest (you can calculate the intermediate numbers if you want to, but they will do it for you). However, knowing it's that easy requires reading a lot of instructions, and if you make enough money (depending on filing status), it suddenly gets much more complicated (forms 8959, 8960, 6251 have income triggers), and if you have 1099s (INT or DIV) you might need to file Schedule B and form 8995. And if you have a mortgage, you should do your taxes twice to see if itemizing with Schedule A is better. And god forbid you sold anything and have to do Schedule D and forms 8949.
- pastage 2y ago
  I do not understand you guys, I do not care about my taxes. They are fairly complex by Swedish Standards because I deliberately loose money In some area that gives me tax cuts, but not overly so. Every year I get a digital form to sign from the tax office, I pay residual taxes and send it in all digital. This takes me in totalt 20 minutes including everything. Everything is prepared for me all I have to do is check if everything is correct. I can not fathom even copying those numbers correctly from diffrent sources in under an hour. I do not want to do my taxes. I just want to be informed so I can double check and pay them. Spending an hour doing taxes seems crazy ineffective .
atrettel 2y ago
If paying for TurboTax works for you, that's great. If you find it worth the money, that's great. It's just not worth it for me and wanted to tell people there is another way. I never said it is hard. Slow and tedious, but not hard. I take my time. I probably could speed it up, but I usually listen to music while I do it and try not to stress myself out about it.
lotsofpulp 2y ago
The cost of giving money to Intuit is that they then give it to politicians to create a more convoluted tax return so that you are further locked into giving Intuit money every year.
- zugi 2y ago
  I realize you're just repeating frequently reported information, and Intuit has indeed lobbied against the IRS creating a free competitor to their product. But Intuit has not lobbied to make taxes more complicated. Congress does that well enough on its own. If you reread the original ProPublica piece that kicked off all the Intuit-hate 6 years ago, you'll see they imply it but carefully don't actually say it or back it up; others quoting the article were less careful.
mandeepj 2y ago
> Turbo Tax usually costs me like $50 You may not have Rental income and Stocks to report

kamranjon 2y ago

Would love to read a blog post on this. 10 - 15 hours is probably too much but I bet if I learned how to do it I could figure out how to optimize it with all the tools that are available today. Would love if TurboTax just died because everyone figured out they could do taxes on their own with just a little supplemental help from local models or something similar.

SoftTalker 2y ago
If you just have W2 income and take the standard deduction, taxes are really quite simple to do on paper. It's a two page form, most of which you leave blank. If you have self-employment income, business income, capital gains, 401k distributions, HSAs, 529 plans, etc. it can get complicated but at that point TurboTax honestly doesn't help all that much (unless it's gotten a lot better since I last used it). If you get to the point that your taxes are too complicated to do by hand you probably need an accountant anyway.
- fooker 2y ago
  > at that point TurboTax honestly doesn't help all that much It does. I have most the things you have mentioned and it was automated, except for correcting a small situation their OCR messed up by reading an extra blank space from the form.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Well that's good to know I guess. I haven't used it since they could OCR forms. I had to key them in manually, and it really didn't do anything much more than a standard 1040 return and the most common additional schedules.
simonsaysso 2y ago
10-15 hours is NUTS. I do mine by hand every year and I can get them done in about 3 hours. I would say my taxes are nontrivial thought certainly not super complicated (no K1s)
2y ago

2muchcoffeeman 2y ago

Do you have a more complicated return eg other income, investments, etc or is this the average of how long it takes? That’s insane.

atrettel 2y ago
I don't have a particularly complicated return, to be honest. I just take my time and don't stress myself out about it. The time includes everything, not just the time I spent putting in numbers. You may find it insane, but I'm OK with it. I'm not going to knock somebody for doing something different, but I do think it is important to know how to do it yourself when push comes to shove.
singron 2y ago
I'm not OP, but if you are a reasonably high-earning professional common on this site, you trigger a ton of stuff. I used to take about that long to do mine, although I've gotten much faster. In a normal year, I typically file forms 1040, Schedule A, Schedule B, Schedule D, Schedule 2, 6251, 8606, 8949, 8959, 8960, 8995 + state versions of some of those. I'm also married, so I calculate all permutations of joint/separate with itemized/non-itemized, which also requires you to actually figure your taxes instead of leaving it blank and letting the IRS do it. It gets really complicated very quickly, but if you are single, have less income, and it's only from wages, it's much simpler.
- atrettel 2y ago
  Yes, you are right. In hindsight, what I viewed as "complicated" is not what everyone else views as complicated. Because I do this manually, I am much more aware of all of the different forms and roughly when to use them than most other people, so I don't view my taxes as particular complicated because I can see situations where they can get insanely more complicated. I filed more than just form 1040 with the IRS this year if anyone is curious. As to the permutations aspect, this does take a lot of time but it can net a lot of savings. One thing that I would add is that you do have the choice to round to the cent or the whole dollar (at least with the IRS), but generally I have never found that to make any substantial difference, so I just round to whole dollars at this point and don't waste my time trying to optimize that.

tombert 2y ago

I have the technical skill to handle the math, but there is no way that I'm spending fifteen hours to do my taxes when there's a free-to-low-cost thing readily available that will do a similar or better job in like 45 minutes. I used CashApp taxes this year, and I liked it. It was actually free and it didn't do any upsell in the process.

zingerlio 2y ago

I second this. Although I only hand filed for two years and then transitioned to FreeTaxUSA. The benefit is that after going through their wizard/interface, I can confidently check the generated IRS forms to make sure it’s filled to my intent.

IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago
big thumbs up to freetaxusa
atkailash 2y ago
[dead]

whyenot 2y ago

It took me 58 minutes to do my not that simple taxes (both state and federal) using Turbo Tax. The cost was about $200. Based on your time estimate, it saved me 1-2 work days of time. That seems like a good bargain to me. What I don't like with Intuit is the sleazy ways they try to upsell you and to trick you into allowing them to use your financial information for non-tax purposes.

beej71 2y ago
What sounds better to me is spending 58 minutes and $0. Seems like a better bargain.
chneu 2y ago
Mine took the same time and only cost $15 because my state charges. Freetaxusa. I could have done it for free if I mailed my state, but whatever. My taxes are also well above what's average(personal plus 2 biz). TurboTax is a rip off. There are dozens of free websites that do the same thing: ask you a handful of questions and fill out a spreadsheet/form. $200 is mind bogglingly expensive for doing it yourself. TurboTax does nothing that dozens of other FREE services don't also do. It's just a few questions.

neilv 2y ago

Your mileage may vary. I did taxes by hand for a few years, probably 20+ hours each year, every hour stressful. For example, at some point, I'm fatigued and surprised how much work it was thus far, but I think I can see the finish line on the horizon, but then one line in a form triggers a cascade of additional schedules and many more hours. Then, finally, the federal forms are done, and it's a stack... And the state forms are somehow not just a 1-pager of quickly copying key numbers from federal 1040, but seem (subjectively) to more than double the work, and produce a second stack. The last 2 tax years, I decided it was a really unhealthy amount of stress, so I've bought TurboTax Home & Business. I run it in a KVM instance that gets airgapped, on principle, so my data doesn't get sent to corporate surveillance capitalism HQ. Though I don't assume that TurboTax in airgapped VM will keep working every year. But, hopefully, before they inevitably break it some year, and I'd have to do taxes by hand again, I will be killed by a crocodile.

fooker 2y ago
> TurboTax in airgapped VM Just use their website, pick your battles. The government is going to use software to process your stuff anyway, and whatever contractor makes that software will sell it to TurboTax.

chickenzzzzu 2y ago

This is equivalent to compiling every package from source for your Linux install. You don't end up learning too many useful things, all you've done is a very repetitive tedious task that doesn't give you much financial return.

atrettel 2y ago
Well, I've previously used Gentoo, so I don't view that as scary to be honest.
- remram 2y ago
  Gentoo automates the repetitive tedious task, you just have to wait a while.
- oblio 2y ago
  The description above is Linux From Scratch, not Gentoo :-)
sanderjd 2y ago
Yep. Might be worth doing once. But not twice.

fooker 2y ago

It's easy if you just have W2 income. If you have multiple brokerage accounts, RSUs from an employer or two, maybe some consulting income, etc, it's annoying and tedious. And if you have a business, doing it by hand basically means you'll overpay by a good extent.

kazinator 2y ago

I do my (Canadian) taxes by hand also, but not exactly. I calculate all the fields using my homebrew software. All calculations are done there. The software produces a report which is organized by form and field. I can go through it and just put the indicated values into the right forms. The forms are fillable PDFs. I copy and paste most of the values. The last few years, I had perfect results; no correction came back from the Canada Revenue Agency. This year, that d1ckhead Justin Trudeau left us with a surprise; complications to the Canada Pension Plan. Something like a 40% of all the line items in my tax calculation are from the new CPP schedule 5. It has multiple brackets now. I had to redo that section of my system (redefine the model). That is tedious. Anything same as last year is a breeze. I had to model a whole new form this year since I worked for two employers and overpaid EI (employment insurance). The common forms handle CPP overpayment. For EI overpayment there is no "heads up" in the workflow at all. Since there is a deduction for EI payments, you have to do it right; you can easily screw up and naively calculate and claim the overpayment, while keeping the deduction calculated from the the overpaid amount. Anyway, when I used to work with just pen and calculator, it took me about, oh, a bit over an hour or so. 10 to 15 hours seems crazy for personal tax. Is this for a moderately complicated corporation, where you're saving money by not hiring an accountant?

chneu 2y ago

10-15 hours is insane. What are you doing? I do my personal, my 2 LLCs in under 2 hours. I also do my roommates W2 which takes 10 minutes. The whole thing costs like $35. Seriously, how does it take you 10+ hours? I do not understand at all. Lol

chrismcb 2y ago

Why? Why do you recommend it? What does one gain by doing it themselves?

DeepYogurt 2y ago

I file my own too, but we live in 2025 though. We deserve some civility

furyofantares 2y ago

Excellent advertisement for turbo tax. Luckily there's lots of more normal replies to this.

gostsamo 2y ago

There is an old russian tv series called Kitchen where the mc starts his job by stripping the labels from bananas. On the question "what is the sense of that", he gets the answer "for balance in the universe - somewhere there, there is someone else putting the labels on the bananas". Spending 15 hours on filling data that the government mostly knows and can calculate is exactly one of those balancing acts of the universe that nobody needs.

yoyohello13 2y ago

My greatest pet peeve in life is when people make ME work to pay THEM money. I don’t understand why the gov can’t just tell me how much I owe and I pay.

gblargg 2y ago
You'll first need to give them access to all your private financial transactions. I'm a fan of the 5th amendment.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  They already have access to your employer, Bank, and brokerage accounts. I would guess that covers most of what they need for most people anyway.

wyclif 2y ago

Maybe I'm just out of touch because I haven't done taxes by hand for years, but 10 to 15 hours? After I read your first sentence, I seriously expected you to say 2-3 hours. I don't doubt that it really takes that long for you. I just think it's ridiculous that anyone should spend that amount of time on something that should be a lot more simple, streamlined, and efficient.

gblargg 2y ago

Free tax programs are what allow taxes to become so complex that you need a program (or paid CPA) to help fill them out. I refuse to have to get a program to fill them out. A big benefit of filling out yourself is knowing how to minimize the tax burden. Using a program or CPA you never really understand how tax is calculated and the tax consequences of various financial choices you make throughout the year.

beej71 2y ago

I recommend this, as well, especially if you have repetitive taxes. I spend just a few hours doing taxes by hand when it's are similar to the previous year. With an accountant, I have to spend a bunch of time getting things ready, anyway. I only pay them when something weird happens. Also, fuck Intuit.

bigfatkitten 2y ago

My Australian tax return takes me about 20 minutes. The system prefills 99% of the details that they've obtained from my employer, bank, health insurer, stock broker etc directly. All I need to do is fill out my deductions from a running spreadsheet I've maintained throughout the year.