Because, really, everyone knows today is the happiest day of the year. Fellow US residents, now’s your chance to freak out that you waited so long before doing your taxes, or you can be smug about how early you were done.
Sadly, we greatly over-estimated how much we needed to pay and got back huge refunds. Sigh. Math is hard!
This is so amazingly better than the opposite situation that I am pained to see it described as sad. I speak as one who got stiffed by external events at one point and wound up having to write an $8000 check to the IRS that year.
(If I get back $8000 in refund, how much interest income have I forgone by using the IRS as my bank rather than putting it in my savings account? $50?)
$80 to $90 at today’s rates. I’m still not interested in effectively paying $80 to $90 for the IRS to hold my taxes.
I feel like you’re setting up an excluded middle here. My ideal would be to pay $0; I’d be content with being at +/- $500. Of course I don’t want to write an $8,000 check, but just because getting an $8,000 refund is better than paying $8,000 doesn’t mean an $8,000 refund is better than paying $500 and having gotten the interest on what would have been that refund.
All of those are good points. I guess I think most of this boils down to personal comfort levels, and I wound up sounding more confrontational than I intended. I think of the $80 as being the annual premium on my “not having to scrape up an extra $8000 in March” insurance; once-bitten-twice-shy and all that.
There are other facets to tax-refund planning too, of course. We typically aim for a large refund and use that to pay our property tax every spring, because we’ve learned that we have much easier time budgeting for the payment that way, even though we know we’re paying for it. And yes, we realize we’re unusual in this regard. 🙂
I have discovered over the last 3 years that AMT amounts to nothing more than the IRS’s legal extortion of people. There is absolutely no reason that I should qualify to pay AMT but each of the last 3 years I have…and this tax season the number was significantly more than it has been in the past.
I understand the need for taxes…and the concept of those that make more having to pay more…however…the system is inherently flawed and instead of FIXING the problem the answer for the IRS is to write new tax laws that are increasingly more obscure.
We went to a well known national accounting firm to get our taxes done and they actually had to call the national headquarters and have them look at our return since nobody in the local, state, or regional office could figure it out. That’s just pathetic…Im not John D. Rockefeller here…I don’t make that kind of money but you would think I did.
Just plain sad.
We got a fairly nice refund, partially because of the large amounts of taxes taken out of my severance pay last year. In spite of their sincere concerns about unemployment, they’re still taking their share of your severance pay.