Mint salaries (beta)

I expected nothing less! :judge:

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I use credit karma to file taxes because it is completely free. But this data is great! I loved it when my old 401k provider showed average 401k balance by age, income, and age+income.

Unsurprisingly the age 55+ earning 250k+ had the highest 401k balance ($800k, this was just 401k and this was back in 2015)

If you find yourself close to the standard / itemized line, consider alternating years. Pack your itemized deductions into odd years and take the standard deduction in even years, or vice versa.

You can easily split your mortgage payments 13/11 so you get 13 months of mortgage interest in the “itemize” years, and do your charitable contributions in approximately one-year intervals, but get two years worth into one year.

Like if you itemize in odd years: make your “2022” charitable contributions on January 1, 2023 and then make your 2023 charitable contributions in December 2023. The charity is getting their money at pretty close to one-year intervals but you’re getting double or nothing on your taxes, which is what you want.

Pay your January 2023 mortgage payment on January 1, 2023 but pay your January 2024 mortgage payment in December 2023.

Perfectly legal tax avoidance.

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If/when they ever eliminate the SALT cap you can time the payment your property taxes too, and even under-withhold a little on your state income taxes and then make an estimated payment in January. But for folks making actuary money you’re probably hitting the $10,000 cap no matter what you do so for now it’s probably not going to net you anything.

But if/when the SALT cap goes away, if your property taxes are paid from lender escrow, pay them in advance anyway. Your lender will then get a $0 bill and you’ll have too much in escrow the next time they evaluate your escrow and they’ll send you a check for the approximate amount of the property tax payment. (They have a specific formula they have to use to calculate it, but their beginning of the year estimate will be off by roughly the amount of the payment you made plus or minus the amount that their estimates of your taxes & insurance differed from the actual amounts.)

It’s a bigger pain to itemize and try to “(legally) game the system”. Even if it’s “alternate years”.

I have better things to do with my time than I gain from this process.

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Fair enough. To me it’s not much extra work. I was going to make the charitable contributions at year-end anyway, and that January mortgage payment is going to get made regardless.

I don’t do things like wait to go to Salvation Army to drop off old clothes until the following year. That would be a hassle I’m not willing to deal with.

FWIW, I still do things like this, but don’t bother with a “tax receipt”.

You sit on clothing donations until the favorable tax year but then you don’t deduct the donation on your taxes? That seems pointless. I want the stuff out of my house.

Sorry, poor reading comprehension on my part.

I don’t “time” my donations; I just do them when it’s convenient for me (usually deep-cleaning twice a year).

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Ditto, but the one I use is called TaxAct.Com

Secondarily, if I had used Turbo Tax it would piss me off greatly to know that they were using my data to aggregate with others at their discretion and then profiting off of that data.

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Yeah, that’s what I use!