Just to add: The extra refunds are from federal alone. Hawaii apparently does not recognize tax treaties, so the state was fully correct in taxing the Thai pension.
For me, the main advantages of Turbo Tax are the ability to import much of my financial tax information directly to the program from my financial institutions along with e-filing my Federal return included with the $40 cost of the program. For the state return, I print and mail it saving about $20.
The import function may or may not work for you as accepted institutions are limited.
And you may not be able to get things like detailed stock sale / purchase directly from those institutions, either.
If it’s a simple 1099-DIV or whatever, then it’s easy enough to enter that manually if import doesn’t work.
TurboTax DOES import such details from Quicken but I’ve found that it often doesn’t categorize them quite right, so I usually have to massage them a bit. One year I had to mail in paper backups for some stock transactions, as we’d had a lot of sales.
The thing with using an accountant for taxes is that you still have to do a lot of prepwork and gathering of the numbers. You hear tales of people coming in with a shoebox of receipts and asking the preparer to make sense of it (I’ll have to ask my brother, who is a tax accountant, for any horror stories).
But in general: unless the accountant does all your bookkeeping, you have a lot of homework beforehand.
I’ve never used a professional tax preparer myself - but I’m an unusual case in that my mother was, and two of my brothers ARE, tax accountants, so I learned a lot from being around them. On some more complex years (multi-state, home sale etc.) I did the work myself and had Mom take a look at it; on a recent year (huge medical $$, daughter in a residential treatment program in another state) I had a fair bit of back-and-forth with my brother for our situation. Someone without those less-formal resources might well be advised to at least have a pro go through and review everything.
As a side note: I’ve typically done my kids’ returns using my local copy of TurboTax (can’t use the free online version due to income). I finally did my daughter’s this year using the free version. Her return was as straightforward as I’ve ever seen (a W2 and a few dollars in interest) and it even told me something I was unaware of (Vermont has a rental rebate program for low-income residents). She has had zero interest in doing her own return. I feel like I’m failing at passing on the family business.