Euler22

I'm sorry if this has already been answered but I don't see it in the thread after glancing through it for 10 minutes and reading through the Wiki.

Let's say I expect my 2017 personal taxes to be ~$1k but I want to MS $5k and am ok with the fees. Can I prepay the $5k and then file in April, get the refund, and call it a day or will that raise questions? I see a lot of posts about quarterly taxes and paying estimated taxes, I want to overpay.

josephstern

How do you overpay, yet not do so as an estimated payment?

calwatch

Any prepayment done before January 1, 2018, assuming you are on a regular tax year would be considered estimated taxes. After January 1 you could file an extension. It doesn't matter either way, other than for calculation of any penalties, if they apply.

asdfghjk

What date is the earliest that I can pay my last quarter estimated tax using pay1040.com? I need to pay early to meet the spending requirement on a credit card.
When I tried to make a payment today, the website said that i can only make 2 payments per quarter. So apparently, it still thinks that I am paying the ES tax for third quarter. Thanks.

Lumpylump76

Oct 15th

asdfghjk

Thanks.

schistosomiasis

Yes this works. The IRS will refund you $4000. I mistakenly hit the button for 2016 tax payment when I meant to hit 2017 first quarter estimated. The irs cut me a check for the entire overpayment. I paid my first quarter taxes and immediately wrote them a letter to ask for forgiveness of late payment penalties.

scubadu

First, I'll admit that I have not read all 400+ posts in this thread. However, I also think the playing field can change over time, relative to when the thread was originally started.

I've not historically felt it was worth paying taxes via credit card, but this year I'm reassessing as we'll have a quite large tax bill (abnormal) and I'm intrigued with harvesting some benefit from that spend.

My question isn't what card to use (I already know that answer for myself), but whether, given recent events over the last year, if using these types of services has given anyone pause in light of the ever increasing number of data breaches that we continue to see (on rather large scales).

I realize of course that FTer's seem to be obsessed with collecting points/miles, but is there a point where the risk is not worth it? For me, I'm looking at breaches at very, very large companies (retailers, Equifax, etc.) who likely have considerably larger IT departments (and budgets) than say, "pay1040.com." Is anyone but me concerned that in giving SSN, etc. to these very small companies, you are, in effect, giving them the "keys to the kingdom" of your financial life/identity?

It's difficult for me to reconcile, that if an entity such as Equifax can be breached in the manner that it was, I'd think at some point these little tax paying businesses could become very high value targets for hackers and I suspect their damns could be breached far, far easier than many of the other large entities that have fallen to date.

I've seen a few posters here mention being uncomfortable paying online and prefer paying by phone, but that strikes me as non-sensical; once you give them your SSN it's in their system, period. So, if they get breached your information is compromised irrespective of which vector they obtained it by.

I know I probably haven't asked a solid question here, but I guess simply stated, given the increasing levels of data breaches occurring, does this give anyone but me pause in handing over your SSN in exchange for miles/points?

Regards

P.S. I guess for those that have already been doing it, it's sort of moot; your info is already in their hands. But perhaps there are others such as myself wresting with the lust of significant benefits, but unsure whether the risk is worth it.

josephstern

Given that Equifax let out info for half of US residents, I don't feel that my SSN is particularly unavailable out there.

mia

I don't know if it is an important aspect of your decision, but pay1040.com is owned by: https://www.fisglobal.com/ . It's not a small business by any standard.

Happy

Exactly.

On top of that, your SSN could be leaked or stolen from a gazillion places other than an online tax paying service.

Case in point, my husband's SSN was stolen (we suspected it was from the health providers offices / systems) and a fraudulent tax return was filed.

This was in 2014. The only way we found out there was a fraudulent tax return, was that an IRS letter with the wrong street number, was delivered to our box thanks to our mailman at the time basically knew everyone in the area he served. The letter was to inform us to call for question on a refund. That was strange due to we always direct any overage to the estimate tax payment of the following year. Besides, the letter arrived in less than 3 weeks from when we filed our return (paper mail as always).

When we called, the IRS lady told us a fraudulent return was filed. She said IRS caught it due to the request of refund and the amount of refund, completely differed from our filing pattern. She gave us instruction on how to go about it (filed affidavit to declare who he is, AND to file address change form to correct the wrong address back to the correct one, plus to sign up a monitor service.) We never signed up any monitoring service as we believe after financial crisis, no bank would give mortgage without scrutinizing the applicant to the N degree. We really dont care about if a CC is opened under his SSN, given other than Citi, most other banks would automatically show a new card online under the same SSN, so we would immediately know should that happened.

Long story short, it took us 10 months to get the whole thing resolved, including mailing in the affidavits twice, primarily due to the severe manpower shortage IRS had at the time, they were extremely behind in posting receipts into the system. At the end, both the first mailed affidavit and the second mailed affidavit 3 or 4 months later, were entered to IRS system on the SAMEA date... That was hot behind they were. Finally an IRS manager in a district office called us, almost 6pm in the evening, to inform us everything was back to order now. When I asked if we would get a written confirmation of the correction, she did not think we would. But of course 2 weeks later a letter claimed to inform us the closure of the case.

Since then IRS mails a PIN each tax year to be used in our return. They even made a mistake last year when recycling the PIN from previous year, forgot to change the tax year info about on WHICH tax year this PIN was for.... Somehow they caught that mistake and a correction letter came 2 weeks later, admitted the mistake but said the PIN was good to use...

After going thru the above, we really could not care less about the ongoing breaches from all the big companies - sure, it is really a shame that a company like Equifax would be so careless in security measure, but at the end of the day, the ID theft is really blown up out of proportion. Credit card theft does NOT equal to ID theft. The US consumer protection on credit card theft is very strong. It is the banks who lose out on credit card theft, not you and me. Hence the banks sued Target for millions on the breach. Target eventually settled.

In case many of you dont know - the latest ID theft involves SSNs that belong to children, or never used in financial matters. The crooks combine the stolen SSNs with real addresses for their scams. Banks admit they have seen losses from this type skyrocketed the past 18 to 24 months because this type of frauds is much harder and takes much longer, to detect.

Happy

Lots of people just judge a company by its name and how the name is familiar to them...

To illustrate, the other day I read it somewhere a person was complaining about how the "little dingy Barclays" wanted him to submit his personal data for a credit card application...

He obviously has no idea that as of 12.31.16, by some measures Barclays ranked No.15 in the world, while Citi is No.19 as a comparison.

https://accuity.com/resources/bank-rankings/

The 2 banks traded places by another measures.. Barclays is 17 and Citi 13...

The 23 biggest banks in the world - Business Insider

Regardless, Barclays is definitely not a stingy little bank, just because the poster has very little knowledge about it.

mhdena

You can put a freeze on your reports and thaw them when you need to apply for credit.

SkippyME

Hello. Not sure if this has been mentioned already (I didn't see it mentioned, but may have missed it)... I was able to pay my estimated taxes through Official Payments using a VGC issued by GD. Purchased at WM. A VGC issued by MB still failed to run as debit (possibly user error - I only tried one time and then moved on to a different card).

Lumpylump76

No, this is consistent with other reports. I tried MB and US Bank cards in Oct, and OfficialPayments rejected them. Sounds like I need to make a trip to Walmart.