Taxes: Do you prepare your own or get a professional to prepare them for you?

If your taxes are simple, like mine, do your own. You don't even need software, just read the IRS books and fill in an Adobe form online to print.

If you have a complicated tax situation (student loans, home loan interest, sales tax deductions, etc), it might pay off to have a tax professional do the taxes for you. But then again, if you are good at finding these deductions, you can save hundreds of dollars to do your own taxes.

The bottom line is, how complicated is your tax situation and how much is your free time worth per hour?

I prepare my own, but I have an advantage, I'm a CPA/Tax Preparer, and I prepare my joint tax return using our office software on my free time. So it costs me nothing except the time it takes me to enter the information.

I do my own. I don't trust other people to do my taxes. Unless you are willing to pay a large accounting firm $300/hr to do your taxes, most tax preparers are seasonal workers getting paid $10-$15/hr. Needless to say, they are not true tax professional.

I use a professional. Last year H&R Block charged me $169.00

I do mine all on my own and mail them in. It costs me about 3 hours of my time.

i do it using turbotax...its easy to use and pretty efficient...anyway...id rather me fu*k it up than anyone else...