Celebrate a Tax Holiday Near You

Ohio will have its first tax holiday ever the weekend of August 7-9, 2015. It will give sales tax exemptions for clothing and shoes under $75, as well as school supplies and instructional materials under $20. For more information, call 1 800 304 3211.

This will be a first time ever for Ohio, but other states have had them for years. Here's a list of all the sales tax holidays in various American states for 2015. As noted, many are created to give parents a break on school supplies and are timed accordingly. However, some in the south support the purchase of hurricane supplies, and the forward-thinking states of Georgia and Virginia also give a break on the purchase of Energy Star appliances.  Tennessee gives a break on computer purchases. Check on your state and go to the listed state websites for more detailed information on what is allowed, and what's not.

Now's the Time for Free Tax Preparation

The new tax season is the time for tax prep, and for low and moderate income taxpayers, free tax preparation is available. Finding out where is as easy as dialing 1-800-906-9887, or seeing this website and putting in your zip code. They are best able to tell you if you are due an earned income credit (or working, low income people), or how the new health care law affects your return.

This site has a list of what to bring so that your preparer can work on the forms. And while you won't get an instant tax refund, you won't lose a chunk of it to the preparer, like you will if your taxes
are prepared at an "instant tax return" place. Check out this video that explains the trouble of these instant return places--you lose a piece of your returns before you even get it.

In the Toledo area, getting an appointment with a tax preparer is as easy as dialing 211. If you have a household income of less than $53,000 give them a call.

Free Tax Preparation From a Lot of Places

Usually, we don't do for-profit on this page, but free is free, even if it's a marketing tactic.  Liberty Tax Service is providing free tax preparation at certain times this tax season for NEW clients in certain lines of work. 

The military/veteran week, is alas, gone, but there is still a week for teachers and education employees (including bus drivers), hospital workers, police and fire fighters, volunteers and seniors.  Yes, they would like you to be paying clients next year, but they want to give you an introduction to their service now.

Of course, if you make less than $52,000 a year, you may be eligible for free tax preparation by VITA volunteers.  Call  1-800-906-9887 to find a volunteer near you or check this link. If you are over 60 you may get free tax preparation by TCE (tax counseling for the elderly) volunteers.  See this page for a location for TCE or AAPR aid near you, or call 888-227-7669.

For free tax preparation for military personnel, see this IRS page.

One-Stop Shop for Free Online Tax Filing. Or Finding Someone to Help for Free

Tax season is back, and there are some good alternatives for people who need help filling out their taxes.  If you earned less than $58,000, try My Free Taxes.  It is a site created by several nonprofit sites working in partnership, including the Walmart Foundation, United Way, Goodwill and the National Disability Institute.  It links you to free software, provides information on the VITA and AARP programs, and calculate your earned income credit.  There's even a page with a full choice of free tax assistance sources.  

Under File in Person, you can put in your zip code and find all the contacts for free tax assistance for a five or ten mile radius.  Whether you want to do it yourself or not, you can find free tax assistance for those making less than $58,000.

Finding Out About Your Tax Breaks and Credits Under Obamacare

Everybody knows about the healthcare website where you are supposed to sign up for the health insurance exchanges if you don't have adequate insurance.  But for individuals and businesses, those benefits have tax implications, like tax breaks and credits.  How do you find out about those in detail?  With the IRS, of course. The IRS has a page with links telling individuals and businesses about the implications of the Affordable Care Act.  There is also a Q and A page for individuals and businesses. 

For businesses, there is also an independent calculator to figure out the implications of the business tax credit on their taxes--and their employee's health coverage.  The Small Business Majority has a calculator that figures out a business's tax credit under the new law, based on the total payroll, number of employees, and the employer contribution. 

Just a Shorty on... Tax Holidays, 2013

A short posting (or really, a reposting of a good page from the Federation of Tax Administrators.  Several states offer "tax holidays" -- periods where there is no sales tax charged on certain goods.  Often, it's school supplies, or laptops, and sometimes it's regionally significant (like the Louisiana tax holiday on hurricane supplies).  Here is the link for state tax holidays in 2013.  While some of them are past, many are still in the front-view windshield.  Take advantage if you can.

Happy New Year! Earned Income Tax Credits, and How the Poor May Have Not Been Entirely Screwed by Washington. We'll See

Happy New Year's, peeps!  Among the hooha about raising taxes on the top 2% in the fiscal cliff negotiations, it was little noted that the expansion of earned income tax credits instituted in 2009 were scheduled to expire.  It appears that the deal struck by the Senate late last night will preserve this expansion.  **Update** The final law passed, extending the current EITC expansion for five years.

As noted in this blog before, the earned income tax credit is a tax break available to the working poor, giving them not only a deduction, but an actual credit on earned income.  It was established in the 1980s, and expanded at various times, the latest being in 2009.  In the new fiscal cliff agreement, it (hopefully) will be preserved--if the House agrees to the package.  We'll see.

However, 24 states also have an EITC for poor and moderate income wage earners.  Click here to find out if your state has an EITC.  To find the tax office for your state and its current tax forms, check here, courtesy of the Federation of Tax Administrators.  If you are a low to moderate income person, you may also find someone to prepare your taxes for free as well, or call 1-800-906 9887 (for VITA tax services) or 1-888-227-7669 or tax services for the elderly.

 

An Ohio Tax Amnesty, and Tax Holidays in Several States

The state of Ohio has offered a tax amnesty for people who have not paid a consumer use tax (on goods or services obtained in the state after 2009), you may be eligible or a tax amnesty.  Here’s the FAQ.  If you weren’t registered for the tax, there may be some payment plans (at zero interest) available to help you pay.

 Looking this up made me inadvertently find a list of tax holidays—periods where state sales taxes are not levied on certain products in 23 states.  The list is courtesy of the Federation of Tax Administrators.  It’s an interesting list; for instance, in Mississippi, there are two days a year that you can get a tax holiday on clothing and footwear up to $100 in value, and for three days, you get no tax on weapons, ammo and other hunting supplies for three days in September.   Check it out and see if there are a few days of the year when it might be worth your while to buy certain things.

Filing Your 2012 Taxes Online...For Free

There are lots of come-ons for online tax filing services that promise to get you quick refunds, as well as for tax preparation software that can help you.  In truth, many people are entitled to free tax help.  In a previous post, I discussed face-to-face tax assistance that low and moderate income people can get, and where to find it. 

You can also efile for free at any income level at the IRS website for efiling.  However, this site does not become active until January 17, 2012.  If you want to get a jump on this, you can file a federal tax for for free on this site by TaxACT.com. It's a commercial site, but the basic vanilla service for federal returns is in fact free for every income level.  However, if you want fancier services like state returns, importing your old returns, etc., you can get these for additional fees.

Here's some distinctions in IRS free efiling services: the IRS allows anyone at any income level to file for free, but people with an adjusted gross income of less than $58,000 can also have a choice of free software to help them.  But you must wait until January 17, 2012 to file for 2011.  If you can hold off that long--and have an adjusted gross income of less than $58,000--you can have access to free software to help you with your efiling.  Good (free) things come to those who can wait a few weeks.

The Tax Break Just for Poor and Moderate Income People...The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)

People are now thinking about filing taxes for the past year.  Please remember that if you are a low-income person, or even a moderate income person supporting children or a permanently disabled person, you may qualify for the earned income tax credit.  It may be worth looking into.

You can start looking into the EITC on this page. It's the overview of the program.  If you dig around a little you can find this page that gives you the income limits and maximum tax credits for the tax year 2011 (the one you are going to file for in early 2012). It's frustrating, because as of December 27, 2011, the page only had a EITC assistant up to the tax year 2010.  But if you try the page later, it may have a more current EITC assistant. 

As noted, you don't have to have children to  qualify for this if your earned income is low enough.  Here, you can find out what qualifies as "earned income."  You can also find out who qualifies as an eligible child for EITC purposes here.  And if you are supporting a permanently disabled child of any age, they may count as an eligible child. 

However, you can't get the tax credit if you don't file--and you must file for the credit to get it. For couples filing jointly with three or more qualifying children (and incomes up to more than $49,000), they may be able to get a credit of over $5,000.  Who wants to leave that kind of money on the table?  Of all the "free money" hype, this one is real, and really helps people who need it. Look into your earned income tax credit options.

Free and Low-Cost Help With Taxes and IRS Audits and Disputes

Soon we will be gearing up to make out tax forms, or have some smart person do it for us.  The nonprofit groups that have gotten VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) grants from the feds will be gearing up to take appointments from now until the middle of April.  How do you find these places?

In many places like Toledo, you can call 211 and set up appointments after the first of the year.  In fact, at the ONE Village Financial Center in north Toledo, you can call 419-724-5640 and set up an appointment right now.  If you worked in 2011, and made less than $50,000, you are eligible for free tax preparation from United Way of Toledo. Call 211 or 1-800-650-HELP (4357) to set up an appointment.
While the final list of VITA sites and times are being created right now, when tax season comes, you can call toll-free at 1-800-906-9887 to find a location near you.  For more information, check this website.  This number will also give you the locations and times of volunteers who work on the tax returns of older people on a volunteer basis(Tax Counseling for the Elderly).  Remember to call early; VITA tax sites are often booked to the hilt early, and you may be left out.  AARP has a similar website and hotline for volunteer tax services for older Americans.  Either check the website between late January and the middle of April, or call 1-888-227-7669.

Another place to check for tax help if you live in Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas is the Benefit Bank website.  Put in your zip code, and find out the places nearest to you where low and moderate income people can get free tax application help.

Besides this, there are some nonprofit organizations that offer to represent low-income people (those who make less than 250% of the poverty guidelines), in audits and disputes with the IRS.  See this webpage to find the one near you.  It has the income limits for clients they will represent in tax cases, state by state, phone numbers and cities for each location and a list of languages that they can provide translation for in the case of clients who do not speak English.

Free Help Filling Out Your Taxes

It's tax time, and despite the delays in tax forms rolling out (due to the long congressional negotiations on taxes), there are some things that are holding steady.  One is the availability of free help in filling out taxes for low to moderate income people. For people making $49,000 or less a year, you may be eligible to have your taxes completed by volunteers through the VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance).  The service is offered at more than 7,000 sites around the country, and can be found at this site.  And don't be shy about calling your local public library to see if there are more where you live--many may have sprung up after this listing was compiled.  Find your nearest site and make an appointment, and bring all the paperwork described at the website.  Or call 1-800-906-9887 for more on the program.  As noted on the site, there is also tax help available for the elderly, and for military personnel. AARP also provides free tax return work.  You can find a location near you here.   In Toledo, you can see these free  VITA tax sites for 2011.

For more places that can help with your taxes in several states (Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania), see the Benefit Bank.   Put in your zip code, and it shows you places where you can sit down with someone one on one and find out about benefits, and where you can get tax filing help.  These people are especially trained to help low-income people get the most out of their tax return.    See this site for free tax preparation for military members and the elderly, too.  


And remember the biggest tax friend that many low and moderate income earners will ever have: the Earned Income Credit.  One of the good things about the tax compromise in December is that some generous EIC benefits have been extended.  If you are a lower-income working person with more than 1 eligible child, you definitely need to check your eligibility here.  But you don't necessarily have to have children to be eligible.  But you should check it out!

Websites With Scams to Look Out For

The Office of the Ohio Consumers Counsel came out with a lovely website devoted to scams of all kinds: not by company name, but by type. It has a list of scams, you click on the name, and it gives a brief description of the scam and how it works.
This got me to thinking about other sites that can warn you about rip-offs and scam artists. Besides unedited rants by anonymous people claiming to be ripped off by someone, where do you turn for solid, well-vetted information? Here’s some of my favorites:

Speak Out Ohio. An excellent website by the Ohio Attorney General, with new scam listings, plus a searchable database of consumer complaints, searable by names or keywords.
· Better Business Bureau. Their business checkup can be searched by name and phone number for charities and businesses. Sometimes the information is sketchy, or very guarded, but if you read between the lines, it tells you what you need to know. For instance, if you look at their information on “free grant” sites, and you see a lot of caveats—stay away!
· Snopes. This fine site does not list names, but types of scams, searchable by the word scams.
· FBI –E Scams. This site by the FBI tells about all sorts of e-mail scams by type.
· Tax scams. This is by the IRS, and tells about types of scams and dubious tax claims. Bonus goodness: Link to an IRS site devoted to "frivolous" tax claims i.e. income tax is voluntary, etc., with links to actual cases.
· Scholarship scams. A site by the federal Department of Education on what to look out for in sites promising scholarship money.
· Federal Trade Commission. A site covering all sorts of consumer and scam issues.