3 Habits of Filing Taxes You Need to Stop

Every year you file your taxes. When you get a refund, you're more motivated to file and may even be excited for the beginning of the year to roll around. Other times you may feel too busy or that your taxes are too complicated to file, so you let years of unfiled tax returns pile up. Whatever methods you use to motivate yourself to file your taxes, here are 3 habits you need to stop. See if you are guilty of any of them, and learn ways you can remedy your faults.

Filing taxes yourself

Sure, it's easy for you to go online,  push a few keys, and—voilà!—your taxes are filed and your refund is on its way. Or, you can just go to your local library and grab the simplest filing form you can find and mail your taxes in the old fashioned way. While filing taxes on your own may appear to save you time and money, you're missing the key value in not doing them yourself—expertise.

Tax accountants have your best interests in mind, which is to get the largest refund or to pay the least amount of taxes possible. They go over your assets, including retirement funds and gambling winnings, as well as your expenses, including business travel expenses and work uniforms. They use their skills to help give you the most applicable deductions for your taxes. If you file your taxes on your own, you may miss key deductions that could save you money.

"Forgetting" to file

You live a busy life, and if you owe taxes at the end of the year, filing may not be the most important thing on your mind. When you forget to pay taxes, however, you not only get a late fee from the tax services, you can acquire nasty penalty percentage fees as a result. The penalties get larger when you are more than 60 days late.

Remedy your tax aversion by setting aside a few dollars every month to go toward what you estimate you'll owe at the end of the year. Mark a day on your cell phone's calendar that you will do your taxes and follow through. The money you have set aside will help make filing your taxes (and paying them) much less daunting.

Letting your taxes pile up

On the other end of the spectrum are the people who don't file their taxes for many years because they are hoping for a big windfall in refunds when they file all their taxes at once. You can go as long as 3 years without filing taxes and then file more than one at a time with your accountant. While this sounds like a great way to accumulate funds (you can't spend what you haven't received), leaving years of unfiled tax returns in your collection of documents isn't really a good idea. You can forget key receipts and other information and accidentally under-report your earnings, which can lead to refusal of your refund, or worse, an audit. If you have years of unfiled tax returns, contact a tax service to help you as soon as possible.

If you insist on not filing your taxes so you can get a bigger refund later, consider only skipping your tax filing every other year. This way you can still get a refund that is sizable without skipping so many years of filing that you may accidentally hit the deadline.

When it comes to taxes, you don't want to make mistakes. Quit filing taxes on your own, "forgetting" them when you owe, or letting them stockpile when you do have a refund, and your tax season can be much more enjoyable.