I know this has been mentioned in this thread before, but I'll mention it again. Those of you who are discussing how much their refund went up or down - just like the media - are not adding any valuable information at all to this thread.

The amount of your refund has absolutely nothing to do with if you paid more or less to the government in 2018.

Our income went up due to stock options cashed in. We did not do anything more or less than previous years when it comes to before-tax investments (IRA contributions, SEP...). We are part of the group that switched from itemized deductions to standard deductions since the standard deduction is much higher.

Our effective federal tax rate - that's what matters - went DOWN 3.2 points in 2018. (As an example, if our effective tax rate was 50 percent, it went down to 46.8 percent.)

Yes, I understand expecting a refund and not getting one sucks. But this is something you must monitor during the year so you have no surprises.

(And our federal and state refund went way up because I made estimated tax payments that were too much.)

Income was up slightly but taxes were down so I’ll take it. Need to adjust withholding - i hadn’t payed close attention to it this year. My goal every year is to owe a bit and not get a refund.

Ppl waiting on a refund are like people who wait on a company bonus check to survive - neither understand what exactly it encompasses.

quote:

The amount of your refund has absolutely nothing to do with if you paid more or less to the government in 2018.

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THIS


For those of you who work for somebody the payroll deduction was adjusted throughout the year, which may also be a factor.

With no changes on our end other than my wife earning less, our taxes increased by 4x.

Un-freaking-believable!!!

I had our CPA run our taxes last year under the proposed new rules for 19 and he showed us a reduction, but this!!

Not sure where it went off the rails, but boy howdy, it sure did for us.

quote:

Not sure where it went off the rails, but boy howdy, it sure did for us.

Part of having a CPA is to get their advice and guidance. If something drastic like that occurred I'd get whomever did your taxes to explain.

Dropped off my return at the Post Office today; compared to 2017, I made about $1,000 more in 2018 but my 2018 Federal taxes were about -$30; however, Oregon has me paying $210 more . My 2018 tax rate dropped roughly 1.1%

I got a little bit more in my pay check after the Tax Cuts and owe a little bit more on my taxes.

About what I expected since the "little bit more" I got had to come from somewhere.

quote:

Originally posted by Snapping Twig:
With no changes on our end other than my wife earning less, our taxes increased by 4x.

...

What was your effective federal tax rate in 2017 vs. 2018?

Never received big refunds like some seem to get. Used to get a small/moderate federal refund. Now paying. New tax deal did my wife and I no favors.

Finally got my taxes taken care. I've been hounding my accountant for the entire month since he's had my stuff since the end of February, and I didn't hear a thing until today. Of course it took me calling yet again. I knew that I would owe the state a substantial amount so I at least wanted to send that payment by tomorrow.

Well, he managed to finish it all without having to file an extension. I made out a heck of a lot better under this new tax law. Way way better. So I'm happy.

quote:

Originally posted by Wolfpacker:
Never received big refunds like some seem to get. Used to get a small/moderate federal refund. Now paying. New tax deal did my wife and I no favors.

I'm not at all saying your taxes did not go up, rather - again - I'm pointing out your federal refund has nothing to do with the amount of federal taxes you paid.

What was your effective federal tax rate for 2018 compared to 2017? Once you know that figure, you can adjust for 2019 allowing you to get a "big refund" if that is something you really feel you must do.

For the vast majority of federal filers out there, the total amount of money handed over to the federal government in 2018 went down.

Just paid taxes this morning.
My effective tax rate went up from 18% in 2017 to 22% in 2018.

Income increased pretty significantly since I am now self-employed.

I hope the income continues to increase.

Love that even the NYT is having to admit that they were lying in their attempt to portray the tax bill as a tax increase.



https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0.../income-tax-cut.html

Face It: You (Probably) Got a Tax Cut
Studies consistently find that the 2017 law cut taxes for most Americans. Most of them don’t buy it.

If you’re an American taxpayer, you probably got a tax cut last year. And there’s a good chance you don’t believe it.

Ever since President Trump signed the Republican-sponsored tax bill in December 2017, independent analyses have consistently found that a large majority of Americans would owe less because of the law. Preliminary data based on tax filings has shown the same.

Yet as the first tax filing season under the new law wraps up on Monday, taxpayers are skeptical. A survey conducted in early April for The New York Times by the online research platform SurveyMonkey found that just 40 percent of Americans believed they had received a tax cut under the law. Just 20 percent were certain they had done so. That’s consistent with previous polls finding that most Americans felt they hadn’t gotten a tax cut, and that a large minority thought their taxes had risen — though not even one in 10 households actually got a tax increase.



To a large degree, the gap between perception and reality on the tax cuts appears to flow from a sustained — and misleading — effort by liberal opponents of the law to brand it as a broad middle-class tax increase.

That effort began in the fall of 2017, when Republicans prepared to introduce legislation that models by the independent Tax Policy Center predicted could raise taxes on nearly a third of middle-class taxpayers. It continued through Mr. Trump’s signing of the law, even though the group’s models showed that the revised bill would raise taxes on relatively few in the middle class in the 2018 tax year.

After the law went into effect, Democrats played down those estimates and instead highlighted projections that most Americans’ taxes are set to increase in 2026, after the individual tax cuts in the law are scheduled to expire.

The messaging stuck. In December 2017, polling for The Times by SurveyMonkey showed that nearly two-thirds of Americans — and three-quarters of Democrats — did not believe they would get a tax cut from the new law. In this month’s poll, three-quarters of Democrats again said they did not think they got a tax cut from the law, and the overall share of Americans who said they had benefited rose only slightly from the 2017 expectations.

In convincing people that they would not benefit, “the Democrats did a very good job,” said Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center. “They were able to put that into the public perception, and the reality has been unable to break that perception.”

Tax Cuts by the Numbers
Experts are divided on whether the tax law was a good idea. But there is little disagreement on this core point: Most people got a tax cut.

The Tax Policy Center estimates that 65 percent of people paid less under the law and that just 6 percent paid more. (The rest saw little change to their taxes.)

Other analyses reached similar conclusions. The Joint Committee on Taxation — Congress’s nonpartisan team of tax analysts — found that every income group would see a tax cut on average. So did the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning think tank that was sharply critical of the law. In fact, that group went even further: In a December 2017 analysis, it found that every income group in every state would pay less on average under the law in 2019.

So far, tax season seems to be playing out more or less as the experts predicted. H&R Block, the tax-preparation giant, said last week that two-thirds of returning customers had paid less tax this year than last (excluding people who owed no tax in either year). Taxes were down, on average, in every state.

“The vast majority of people did get a tax cut,” said Nathan Rigney, an analyst at H&R Block’s Tax Institute. That’s been clear all along, he added, “just now we have real data to back that up.”

Why Don’t People Believe It?
The tax savings were relatively small for many families, however. The middle fifth of earners got about a $780 tax cut last year on average, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Most Americans would probably welcome a $780 windfall. But in contrast to 2001, when President George W. Bush’s Treasury Department mailed rebate checks to taxpayers, last year’s tax cuts showed up mostly in the form of lower withholding from workers’ paychecks. A few extra dollars in a biweekly paycheck proved easy to miss. Moreover, as taxpayers filed their returns, many found they were due smaller refunds than in the past, which may have further skewed perceptions of the law.

“Most people didn’t recognize the increase in take-home pay, or at least didn’t attribute it to the tax cut,” Mr. Rigney said. Some of them might realize it now that they’re filing their taxes, he said, but “it’s little consolation to discover that you received a couple thousand dollars during the year but you already spent it.”

High earners did far better under the law. The top 20 percent of earners received more than 60 percent of the total tax savings, according to the Tax Policy Center; the top 1 percent received nearly 17 percent of the total benefit, and got an average tax cut of more than $30,000. And that’s not even factoring in the law’s huge cut to corporate taxes, which disproportionately benefit the wealthy households that own the most stock.

Surveys consistently show that what bothers Americans most about the tax system is not that they pay too much but that they think corporations and the wealthy pay too little, said Vanessa Williamson, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution who studies public attitudes toward taxation. The tax law only sharpened those concerns.

And there are other reasons that people might oppose the law, even if they personally benefited. It added hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal deficit — contrary to repeated assertions by Republicans that the cuts would pay for themselves — and could lead to budget cuts down the road. Most of the provisions that benefit individuals are set to expire in a few years, while the corporate cuts are permanent. And there has been little sign so far of the promised lift in business investment.

“People aren’t taking out their pay stubs and Excel spreadsheets and making their determination,” Ms. Williamson said. “Instead they’re making a broader statement about whether the government is doing a good job.”

What About SALT?
One of the most discussed provisions of the tax law was its $10,000 cap on deductions for state and local taxes, the so-called SALT deduction. The cap drew loud protests from politicians in high-cost, high-tax states — and Democratic strongholds — like New York, New Jersey and California.

The SALT cap definitely had a bigger effect in those states. But that doesn’t mean most of their residents saw a tax increase.

For one thing, the two-thirds of Americans who took the standard deduction in previous years weren’t taking the SALT deduction, or any other itemized deduction. And most households earning less than $75,000 — as about two-thirds of households in New York State do — were comfortably under the $10,000 cap.

Paradoxically, many higher-income households weren’t getting the SALT deduction, either. That’s because the alternative minimum tax effectively wiped out many deductions, including SALT, for couples earning more than about $250,000 a year. The tax law significantly defanged the A.M.T., meaning most of those households ended up getting a bit of a tax cut.

The SALT cap did hurt families who earned enough to pay a lot of state and local tax but not enough to be affected by the A.M.T. (Other factors, like how people earned their money, also make a difference.) A Treasury Department audit estimated that 11 million taxpayers fell into that category.

But just because people were bitten by the SALT cap doesn’t mean they were net losers under the law. The law doubled the child tax credit, for example, and made it available to more taxpayers. It also cut marginal tax rates and changed the treatment of some business income.

“A lot of people who are very angry about the SALT were not thinking about it in the context of the stuff that actually benefited them,” Mr. Gleckman said.

“You can construct specific examples of situations” where people paid more, he added, “but they are very specific and over all pretty unusual.”
__________________

Even the narrative that those in high tax blue states paid more is false.

quote:

Originally posted by steve495:

quote:

Originally posted by Wolfpacker:
Never received big refunds like some seem to get. Used to get a small/moderate federal refund. Now paying. New tax deal did my wife and I no favors.

I'm not at all saying your taxes did not go up, rather - again - I'm pointing out your federal refund has nothing to do with the amount of federal taxes you paid.

What was your effective federal tax rate for 2018 compared to 2017? Once you know that figure, you can adjust for 2019 allowing you to get a "big refund" if that is something you really feel you must do.

For the vast majority of federal filers out there, the total amount of money handed over to the federal government in 2018 went down.

How do you figure out your effective federal tax rate?

Just making up numbers and how I figured my effective tax rate:

W-2 Income $63,829
Standard Deduction $12,000 (Single)
Taxable Income $51,829

Tax Liability per Table $5,492

Effective Tax Rate $5,492 / $51,829 = 10.59% Effective Tax Rate

On your 1040 divide line 63 by line 43.

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HUH?!? You might be looking at an old form.

On my Form 1040 (2018) and based on my above assumptions, I show it would be Line 15 / Line 10 (thank you, Sailor)

Smallest image I could find:

This message has been edited. Last edited by: erj_pilot,

New form for 2018. Divide line 15 by line 10;

Old Form divide line 64 by line 43.

quote:

Originally posted by erj_pilot:
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HUH?!? You might be looking at an old form.

On my Form 1040 (2018) and based on my above assumptions, I show it would be Line 18 / Line 10

Smallest image I could find:

You sure it's not Line 15 / Line 10?

ETA: Thanks, Sailor.