Category: Taxes Made Simple
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The senior deduction is gone entirely once a single filer’s income reaches $175,000.
Most tax breaks that shrink with income do it so gradually that nobody notices the exact point where they hit zero. The new deduction for taxpayers 65 and older isn’t built that way. The law behind it sets a specific, calculable income level where the break disappears completely, and for a single filer that level…
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Turning 65 by the last day of 2026 opens the $6,000 senior deduction, meaning a birthday before January 2, 1962.
December 31, 2026 does something no other date on the calendar does for this deduction: it decides, based on nothing but the day someone was born, who gets the new $6,000 senior deduction on their next return and who has to wait another year to qualify. The rule tests a taxpayer’s age on the very…
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Getting no 1099-K does not make the income tax-free, and the IRS still expects it reported.
Not getting a tax form in the mail does not erase the tax bill it would have documented. That is the single biggest misunderstanding hanging over Form 1099-K this filing season, especially now that the federal reporting bar sits at $20,000 and 200 transactions instead of the lower figure Congress once planned. A gig driver,…
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Some states still send a 1099-K at $600, whatever the federal $20,000 threshold says.
A part-time seller in Worcester, Massachusetts, who moved roughly $2,200 in used furniture and freelance design work through payment apps this year will still get a Form 1099-K in January. That comes as a surprise to a lot of people, because Congress just pushed the federal reporting bar for those forms back up to $20,000.…
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Filing separately disqualifies a married couple from the $6,000 senior deduction.
Ray and Carol have filed separate federal tax returns for eleven years, ever since an old business debt convinced their accountant it was safer to keep their finances legally apart. Both are past 65, both collect Social Security, and both assumed a new tax break for seniors would apply to them the same way it…
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Fewer than one in 200 returns used the free federal filing tool.
Treasury’s own math on the government’s free federal e-filing tool comes down to one blunt fraction: fewer than one in every 200 tax returns filed for tax year 2024 went through Direct File. That single number, buried in a report Treasury sent Congress last October, is the central justification the department gives for suspending the…
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The IRS is telling households to protect tax and financial records now, before a disaster makes them impossible to replace.
With hurricane season still active and wildfire risk elevated across parts of the West, the IRS used the first week of National Preparedness Month to make an unusual pitch: treat your tax paperwork like an emergency supply. The agency’s September 3 reminder, IR-2026-104, walks through what to protect and how, on the theory that a…
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The IRS closed its free Direct File tool, leaving the older Free File partnership as the government’s free filing route.
The IRS’s experiment with a government-run, free tax-filing tool is over, at least for now. Treasury told Congress in an October 2025 report that the IRS would suspend Direct File, and a follow-up federal audit released this March confirms the tool’s own web page now tells former users it is “no longer available.” What’s left…
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IRS interest on unpaid tax holds steady into the quarter beginning October 1.
The IRS confirmed this week that the interest it charges on unpaid federal taxes, and pays on refunds it’s slow to issue, will not change when the next quarter begins on October 1. For anyone carrying a tax balance into the fall, or still waiting on a refund that’s taking longer than expected, that means…
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Twelve clean quarters of payroll deposits will stop an employer having to ask for penalty relief at all
Small businesses that run their own payroll are getting their own version of the IRS’s new automatic penalty relief, and the bar for qualifying is measured in quarters, not years. Employers that have deposited payroll taxes and filed on time for twelve consecutive quarters, three straight years on a quarterly clock, will have failure-to-deposit penalties…
