Tax preparation is one of those places I've found that going to a person rather than a website actually really pays off. TurboTax et al handle simple cases fine but if you have a complex situation (I own a home, owned a business, etc etc) having a person who's in the room with you and can directly ask you questions and interpret data that you've got on hand is invaluable.

My tax preparer is something like $250 a year and reduced my liability in a very tumultuous year from about $20K to about $9K by understanding what I actually had going on and helping to work through it.

And an actual tax preparer, not a script reader like H&R Block.

The first year I moved to the US, I had a whole bunch of things going on. Buying a house, working from home, buying a hybrid car etc., getting married. I had no real idea about the tax system, so saved all our receipts etc., and went to H&R Block.

"So what do you want to claim?"

"What can I claim?"

"What do you mean?"

"Here's a bunch of receipts and I can tell you all the details."

[vaguely confused look] "Let's go through the app."

And I watched as basically she transcribed our most basic information into their in house version of something akin to TurboTax.

I could have done that myself.

I complained. And did, eventually, get someone there who knew how to not be a glorified transcriptionist.

And then the next year found someone who had knowledge of their own.

Yup, that happened to me. I paid something like $250 for a tax preparer who just entered the info into TurboTax.

It hit a weird case and she didn't know what to do. Eventually I looked up the actual tax code and told her what to do. As far as I remember it was about splitting the cost basis over multiple years. I owned some weird stock where that came up.

AFAIK, TurboTax does sell access to a version of their software for the script reader, too. ;)

I recommend CreditKarma Tax. Intuit purchased them to destroy them but was forced to sell that division to square. if that's any indicator of how much of a threat they are to intuits revenue stream.

Me too. I have the exact same tax situation as last year, but now it pushed me really hard to upgrade, and at the very last step, it told me that something I entered on page 1 meant that they required me to go up by 1 pricing tier. They VERY CLEARLY made this product so that it wouldn't tell me that I needed to upgrade until I got to the very last step, so that I would feel intimidated at the idea of starting over with someone cheaper. So I switched to TurboTax, went through the same thing, and wound up paying $10 more as an F-You to TaxAct. Although turbotax did the same thing to me, so my moral high ground is pretty imaginary.

Pro tip: TurboTax Deluxe offline version (not the web based one) has all of the forms and schedules, even complex stuff like schedule C businesses, rental properties, and partnerships. They’ll try to upsell you to Premier or Business for “extra guidance,” but you can just say “no keep going in Deluxe.” Deluxe with State can usually be had for $40 or less, but it’s $60 even at full retail.