Comment by neilv

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.