Comment by hedora
7 months 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.
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.
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 .
I don’t care either. I’ve tried hiring people to do them for me, but it ended up being even more work.
The worst thing about our system is that the taxes are impossible to figure “correctly” (that’s not even a concept that makes sense, given how the tax code works) and there are massive legal penalties for getting them wrong.