2025 Federal Tax Return

[Hatchdog]

received email less than 1 minute later that the Fed form has been accepted !!!!

That is a positive step. My refund took 10 days to be approved.

Mine was approved almost instantly and my refund took about 10 days to be deposited.

[rickhem]

I did both my Federal and my State returns last week. Did the efile for both, actually a requirement from NY to efile.

I calculated out what my taxes should be back in late December, and did a conversion of some funds from regular IRA to a Roth IRA, to get that done in 2025. This always makes me nervous, and I even left a bit of a safety buffer, because that math occasionally has some stuff that I don't figure, but it went exactly as I had calculated this time.

Weird to me was that I didn't have anything taken out of the Roth conversion taken out for taxes, which the Federal part had no issue with, but NY determined that I was "underpaying" my taxes throughout the year. They charge a penalty fee for that. That's BS, because if people that pick "single, no dependants" on their W4, and overpay all year, they don't get any kind of overpayment reward. Typical NY nonsense. Anyway, I was able to go through this quarterly income reporting worksheet and show that this lump of untaxed income only happened in the fourth quarter, so that penalty dropped to about 25% of the original fee. I left it at that.

Both were accepted, I had to pay on both due to the Roth conversion, but that money will never be taxed again. ()

[Mags]

I did both my Federal and my State returns last week. Did the efile for both, actually a requirement from NY to efile.

I calculated out what my taxes should be back in late December, and did a conversion of some funds from regular IRA to a Roth IRA, to get that done in 2025. This always makes me nervous, and I even left a bit of a safety buffer, because that math occasionally has some stuff that I don't figure, but it went exactly as I had calculated this time.

Weird to me was that I didn't have anything taken out of the Roth conversion taken out for taxes, which the Federal part had no issue with, but NY determined that I was "underpaying" my taxes throughout the year. They charge a penalty fee for that. That's BS, because if people that pick "single, no dependants" on their W4, and overpay all year, they don't get any kind of overpayment reward. Typical NY nonsense. Anyway, I was able to go through this quarterly income reporting worksheet and show that this lump of untaxed income only happened in the fourth quarter, so that penalty dropped to about 25% of the original fee. I left it at that.

Both were accepted, I had to pay on both due to the Roth conversion, but that money will never be taxed again. ()

Hopefully the Roth conversion didn't affect your Medicare premiums, didn't put you into the Medicare IRMAA adder space.

[rickhem]

[/quote]
Hopefully the Roth conversion didn't affect your Medicare premiums, didn't put you into the Medicare IRMAA adder space.
[/quote]

That's what the calculations in December were for. I kept myself below that line with a little safety buffer.

Medicare uses your AGI from two years prior, but they allow you to do an appeal if your current situation does not have you at that same AGI as two years ago. I went through that process in early 2025 and had them make the correction, and then had to do it again last month to have them correct it for 2026. No IRMAA for me.

So far, all the planning that was done in preparation for retirement has paid off. I just wish that I made more of the 401K contributions to the Roth. That Roth is a very nice thing.

[Ernie]

Mine was Accepted almost immediately, It took 10 days for the refund to be approved. My state refund was not direct deposited. I got a check in the mail Monday. I have not examined my return to find out why I got a check.

[rickhem]

Mine was Accepted almost immediately, It took 10 days for the refund to be approved. My state refund was not direct deposited. I got a check in the mail Monday. I have not examined my return to find out why I got a check.

If you e-file, at least in TurboTax, there is a phase where you decide if you want your refund to be direct deposited, or to have a check mailed to you. If you choose direct deposit, you have to enter data for the bank and the account where you want it to go. My GF does not trust anything that wants that kind of data from her, so she always has me tick the box for getting her refund by check mailed to her. You verify the address to which they'll send the check, and that's it. I'd guess that if you didn't make any selection in those areas, or didn't provide the bank and account number, the only option would be to mail a check to the address on the return, so that may have been it.
All of the many programs that walk you through the filing of a tax return are probably all similar with that. That said, the only one I've ever used is TurboTax, so that's all I can speak to directly.

[Mags]

I use direct deposit. There is too much rural mail theft here.