It’s that time of year again. Unless you’re an absolute champ and already have your taxes done, you’re probably gearing up to file them in the next couple of months. In this post we’ll ignore Washington’s inability to spend less money than it takes in, and instead focus on your taxes at a personal level.
Taxes are sort of a necessary evil. The government needs taxes in order to function, and unquestionably has the right to tax its citizens, but my view is that you shouldn’t pay any more taxes than you legally need to. I don’t have the time or space to get deep into taxes here, but I’ll try to provide some basic tips for those of you to whom taxes are a mystery. If you’re already well-versed with your own tax situation, this post probably isn’t for you.
With a few exceptions, every dollar you make is subject to tax. The obvious and most common source of income is your job, but in most cases if you’re receiving money that’s not a gift, that money’s taxable. If you have a side gig, or you have a yard sale, maybe you win the cash prize in your fantasy football league, or you win a bet with a friend, any time you’ve been given money in exchange for something, that means you’ve generated income, and that income is taxable. You’re responsible for reporting it come tax time. If you’re not reporting it on your taxes and the IRS can prove you received it, you have nobody but yourself to blame.
The U.S. has a progressive tax code. That means everybody is taxed lighter at low income levels, but income is taxed at higher and higher percentages as income levels rise. The lowest tax bracket right now is 10%, but rises to 12%, and then 22%. There are higher levels than that, but if you’re in a tax bracket above that level, you’re probably not going to learn much from this post. The system is a little deceiving if you haven’t ever paid close attention. If you’re in the 22% tax bracket, it doesn’t mean you’re paying 22% tax on every dollar you make; it means you’re paying 10% tax on all your income up to the cap of that first bracket, plus 12% tax on every dollar that’s in the next highest bracket, plus 22% tax on all the remaining dollars. That’s way better than 22% of every dollar you make. After you add up all the money you made last year from various sources, you can do a search for 2023 tax brackets to see where you fall.
Let’s say you’re married filing jointly, and between the two of you, you earn $60,000 a year. The government recognizes it needs to give people a break by not taxing every single dollar they make. Uncle Sam helps people out in the form of something called a deduction. If your tax situation is fairly simple (you rent your home instead of own it, you don’t donate much money to charity, and you don’t mess around with stocks or real estate), you should probably go with the standard deduction. It’s a value that’s updated every year, and in the 2023 tax year the standard deduction for a couple that’s married filing jointly is $27,700. That means you can subtract $27,700 from your annual salary of $60,000 (which shields almost half of your income from the tax man), and you’ll only have to pay taxes on the remaining $32,300. Deductions are good because they reduce the amount of your money that gets taxed, ultimately reducing the amount of tax you need to pay.
A second kind of deduction, called “itemized deductions,” is an option, but doesn’t make sense for everyone to take. For itemized deductions to provide you more value than the standard deduction, your itemized deductions (things like donations to charity, mortgage interest, property taxes, etc.) would need to add up to more than the standard deduction. It’s possible to do it with income of $60,000, but it probably doesn’t happen consistently unless you own a home and/or give a sizable chunk of your money to charity. If you’re making $60,000 as someone who’s married filing jointly, you’re probably going to want to take the standard deduction.
So if you continue with this $60,000 example (where you’re only taxed on $32,300), you calculate the tax according to the tax brackets. Ten percent of the first $22,000 (the upper limit in the lowest married/filing jointly bracket) is $2,200, and then you have to pay 12% on the remaining $10,300 ($32,300 minus $22,000). That comes out to $2,200 plus $1,236, for a total tax bill of $3,436. Don’t lose heart, you probably don’t have to cut a check for that much.
That’s the simplified version. If you have kids that are your dependents living with you, and you’ve provided more than half of their financial support for the year, you get to claim the Child Tax Credit. Depending on the child’s age, you get to subtract up to $2,000 per child directly from your tax bill. Tax credits pack more of a punch than deductions do, because while deductions knock a percentage of a dollar off the tax bill, a tax credit removes 100% of a dollar’s worth of tax liability for every dollar of tax credit you receive. Deductions = good, credits = better.
The last thing I’ll quickly cover is tax planning. Nobody likes to be surprised by a big tax bill when it comes time to file. Some people like to get a refund when it comes time to file, and others would rather pay at least a small amount when they file so they don’t have to give the government an interest-free loan with the money that comes out of each paycheck). I’ll let you decide what’s right for your situation, but the ideal tax planning scenario would be to owe no tax and be due no refund. If you know how much tax you’ll owe at the end of the year, it’s usually pretty easy to ballpark how much tax should be withheld from each paycheck.
Let’s use our example from above (assuming the couple has no kids and no major tax credits). They’ll owe $3,436 in taxes. If they’re paid every two weeks, we can divide 3,436 in taxes by 26 paychecks a year to find that if they withhold $132.16 from each paycheck for federal taxes, at the end of the year that amount should fully cover the tax they owe. They’ll have to readjust for raises or substantial changes in deductions or tax credits, but that’s the gist of it.
It’s too late to make adjustments to Federal withholding for the taxes you’ll be filing over the next couple of months, but since we’re only a month into 2024, you have a great opportunity to choose how much money you accrue by the end of the year to use in paying your ’24 taxes in the winter/spring of 2025. If you know roughly how much money you’ll make this year, you can also ballpark how much money should be withheld from your paychecks. Just make sure to account for the fact that some paychecks have probably already come in and the withholding from them might be different from what you want it to be for the year’s remaining paychecks. Your pay stub usually shows how much is withheld from each check, along with how much has been withheld so far in a given year. Once you determine what you want withheld from each paycheck, get in touch with your payroll department or submit an updated W-4 form to your employer’s payroll support provider.
I can’t even begin to tell you how complicated the U.S. tax code is, so please understand that this is very basic information. There are all kinds of additional considerations to look at (like filing single, married filing separately, and filing as head of household). The way you earn money also affects your taxes; if you’re married filing jointly and one spouse collects a paycheck while the other makes money babysitting, it’s likely that tax is only being withheld from one of those income streams, but both of them figure into the amount of total tax that’s owed, so you’ll need to plan accordingly.
This is only enough information to get you pointed at areas you want to learn more about. I’ve only discussed federal taxes here. State and local taxes vary by location and are in addition to federal taxes, so don’t forget about those. Of course, the best way to ensure that you’re getting it done right is to pay a tax professional to do it, but if you’ve got a fairly simple tax situation and don’t mind working with numbers, you can probably file them yourself. Tax software makes it easier to do on your own, and can often get it done cheaper than paying someone else to do it.