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.