Please help. I'm 74 years old and I want to see if I can get my taxes done without paying anyone. I made an account through irs.gov. But even that seems hard to understand and seems like every place I turn for answers requires my numbers - bank account, credit card, etc. to pay them for their help. Can anyone please help me find a tax discussion forum or something where I can ask some questions like where I find a simple chart showing what fraction of my social security and annuities I pay on. It seems like the charts I've found are different from each other. Finally, I admit, I am kind of like not very smart when it comes to stuff like this. Thank you.
It's not smart to give people tax advice or to receive tax advice from random people on the internet these days. It's become too complicated. Frankly, income tax needs to be abolished for a simpler tax system.
There are too many variables, so making a clear answer is not really possible. For many years, my wife and I had someone do our taxes, and I didn't do anything but hand him the W2s and other forms. I retired a few years ago, and was in the same position you seem to be in. We always did the long forms before, but now are doing short forms. I didn't know if I was doing it right or not. But I did use the E-File program. Yup, you have to create an account, and if you want any refunds deposited into your bank account (fastest way), it's what you have to do. In all honesty, it was really simple. You don't need the charts and you don't need a calculator. The program goes through each step and can tell you if you did something wrong. I get done, it says "good job," and my refund shows up in my account about two weeks later.
Sorry - long reply, but still need help. Thank you GrayMan and Adfundum. But now asking you or anyone more questions. First of all, I don't have a lot of variables. Now I did find a site that had an example with The financebuff or something like that. While I will not post what I earned, the calculator I found had an example already done for social security benefits of 30000 and for 30000 received in annuities. So I would like to ask questions based on that example. For sake of discussion, let me say that was my earnings (it was actually more than mine). So when I pressed calculate for that example it said $6850 of the $30000 in Social Security was taxable. Does that sound right? (Sounds pretty good to me - I thought it would be more!) So anyway, I guess the taxes would be paid on $6850 plus the $30000 in annuity for a total of $36850. So if that was my situation, I would simply have to pay tax on income of $36850, right? Again, just asking anyone out there if that sounds right. If it is, I guess I could just use that calculator to do my own calculations. Actually as I write this stuff down in my reply here, I am working through it with a bunch of tabs open. Hope I'm not too confusing, but admit I just found another thing to consider. Sorry, this is getting even longer than I planned. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but then I'd just have to find a tax table that lists the tax that is supposed to be paid on $36850 income - right??? Well, I think so, so I found a tax table that said the tax would be 12% on all taxable income over $10,275. That kind of threw me, but now I guess that calculates to 12% of ($36850 - $10275) which equals 12% of $26575 or $3189. So if that was me, I'd have to pay $3189 in taxes for the year 2022. Then I guess I'd just subtract the amount of tax I've already paid and send a check or expect a refund. So if I already paid say $2000, then I'd have to send the irs a check or money order for $1189 - right.
It's kind of hard to say if you need to pay those taxes of not. When I retired, I was told the amount of Social Security I get would not be taxable. Anything above that is taxable. SSA does not send a w-2 form, but I do have other income, and they do send W-2 forms. I was confused the first time also. SSA and the IRS have information on their sites, but it didn't help me much. However, when I did the e-file thing (I used FreeTaxUSA) it pretty much walked me through, making sure I didn't miss anything. I would recommend trying that. There are other free tax sites, so use the one you like best.
