Main Street Dollars

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The IRS spent late August laying out, in plain terms, the different ways a taxpayer can hand someone else legal standing to deal with a federal tax matter. For a family helping an aging parent manage Social Security paperwork, income-linked Medicare premiums, or a stack of unopened IRS notices, the distinction between two commonly confused…

The IRS is telling taxpayers to photograph their belongings now, because a disaster loss claim depends on records

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in Credits & Deductions

The Internal Revenue Service opened National Preparedness Month with a specific instruction for taxpayers: photograph and video what a household owns before a wildfire, flood, or hurricane takes it. In a September 3 announcement, the agency said that recovering after a disaster, filing an insurance claim, and claiming a tax benefit for lost property all…

Extension filers have until October 15, and the IRS says filing sooner cuts the interest and penalties that keep accruing

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in Free Tax Help

Millions of taxpayers who asked for extra time to file their 2025 federal return are working against a hard deadline: Oct. 15, 2026, a Thursday. The Internal Revenue Service says extension filers do not need to wait until that date arrives, encouraging early submission because interest and penalties on any unpaid tax keep accumulating the…

Treasury proposes limiting the refunded part of four tax credits to citizens and qualified immigrants

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in Credits & Deductions

The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service have proposed a new regulation that would limit who can receive the refunded portion of four federal tax credits, applying a citizenship and immigration status test that has not been enforced this way before. The rule targets the cash-back piece of the Adoption Tax Credit, the Child…

Treasury would hold Trump Account money in index funds charging 0.1 percent at most

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The federal government wants to put a hard ceiling on what Wall Street can charge to manage the retirement-style savings accounts it opened for millions of American children. Under a proposed regulation from the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service, money sitting in a child’s Trump Account could only go into a stock index…

A new 1 percent tax on cash sent abroad loses its penalty grace period after this quarter

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Every dollar a U.S. resident sends home in cash, a money order or a cashier’s check has carried a new federal tax since New Year’s Day this year, and the companies that collect it have been operating under real slack from the IRS while they build the systems to do it correctly. That slack runs…

The new car loan interest break starts shrinking once income passes $100,000, or $200,000 for a couple

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in Credits & Deductions

A new federal tax break lets some car buyers deduct the interest on an auto loan, but the deduction was never designed to reach every household that finances a vehicle. Once a filer’s income clears a specific line, the break starts shrinking, and the IRS has not spelled out publicly exactly how far the reduction…

The IRS lists 71 occupations that qualify for the tip deduction, and it stops at $25,000

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Tip income only qualifies for the federal “no tax on tips” deduction if the job that earned it appears, by name, on a specific federal list — and that list just got longer than a lot of workers realize. Treasury and the IRS finalized the roster this spring at 71 occupations spread across eight industry…

The home energy and electric vehicle tax credits are gone, and this is the first full year without them

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Homeowners and car shoppers who spent the last few years factoring a federal tax credit into the price of a heat pump, a solar array or an electric vehicle are now shopping without one. Congress shut down three separate federal credits through the same law last year, and 2026 is the first calendar year households…

Marketplace customers who underestimate their income now repay every dollar of the subsidy

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