I would hope anyone who made it through A US K-12 education would be able to do their own taxes if all they have is W-2. Even 1099/student loan interest deductions/etc is pretty easy.
I would say it only gets really complicated once you venture into dealing with equity and AMT and stuff.
It’s funny though that people will scour the web and clip coupons to save money, but they won’t research how their biggest expense (tax) is calculated.
Researching how taxes are calculated takes up valuable time and mental capacity, and you have to reeducate yourself every couple years on whatever new tweaks to the tax system happened.
> Researching how taxes are calculated takes up valuable time and mental capacity
So does deal finding and coupon clipping, which is what the parent was comparing to.
If you have just a salary, no mortgage, and no stock/equity transactions, nothing has changed in 20 years, and it takes all of 10 minutes to fill the Federal form out (and I'm being generous). Every once in a while there is some extra credit, but it's usually prominently advertised. A simple hack is to look at the previous year's tax form and compare to see if anything has changed, and look up the guide related to those entries.
If you do basic stock transactions (RSU, SPP, buy and sell), then it's a bit more pain, but still easy.
Deductions are things one can easily miss, but even then, once you figure it out, you just have to keep an eye out for changes to deductions. The recent tax changes screwed it all up (although they also made taxes overall easier for those not in high COL states), but the usual deductions to watch out for are mortgage interest, state taxes, property taxes, and charitable donations.
If you have other things going on (side business, etc), then I would suggest paying for a CPA.
Worst case, just plug the numbers into TT and see if what you get is the same. If they imply you can get more, then pay someone to do it for you.
I know people like to think it will take a lot of effort, but at least for my salary, if I count the hours it takes for me to do all this, it's always cheaper than paying a CPA.
I would say it only gets really complicated once you venture into dealing with equity and AMT and stuff.
It’s funny though that people will scour the web and clip coupons to save money, but they won’t research how their biggest expense (tax) is calculated.