I'm a single individual with no spouse, children, house or small business. I'm reticent to use programs like TurboTax because I just don't see what value they add above doing it myself.<p>I could definitely see the advantage of using a program or going to a professional for a small business, but for one person it just doesn't seem that hard.<p>Am I just being naive?
I did my own taxes from when I started earning enough money to report it (age 19) to when I moved out of my parents house (age 27), because my dad was always distrustful of tax programs or advisors. I switched to TurboTax for the past 2 years.<p>I've found that TurboTax cut down on the time required to do my taxes from "a weekend" to "about 3 hours", and saves me roughly $300/year in deductions that I didn't know I could take. It's been well worth the $50 or so I pay for it.
Your question phrasing is a little odd; I would consider using software (rather than paid help) as "preparing my own taxes".<p>TurboTax and similar are barely $30, for federal + state. Plus they're tax-deductible!<p>What's the value of your time? They don't need to save that much time to pay for themselves, much less if they catch an error or opportunity that you would miss (unless devoting a lot more reading and care to the paper forms/instructions).<p>Sure, if you've only got one W-2, no or very simple retirement accounts, no or very simple deductions, you can probably do without any software. But even then, I think there are then free online forms to help avoid simple mistakes or tallying errors.<p>(In my platonic-ideal digital republic, the tax code and the tax preparation software would be one and the same, and subject to a capped complexity budget in kB.)