Freelancers: Pay Your Taxes | Hacker News Reader

Freelancers: Pay Your Taxes

petekeen.net

2 pointszrail6 comments

Or don't...and invest that money during the year. It's trivially easy to earn more investing than you will pay in interest to the IRS at the end of the year.

I'm all for investing my own money, but investing the IRS' money seems really risky. I still owe that money to them, even if the market goes down. You could theoretically do some fancy tax lost harvesting, I suppose, but I would want to be very sure of my math.

Depending on what kind of Money Market account you have the interest can be low or high; and you can determine your risk.

Basically if you can hold onto the money and save it; the interest can make it easier to pay the IRS.

... It's not like the IRS will give you interest if you pay quarterly; or a cut of your taxes.

Lastly, it's stupid to overpay your taxes thinking your going to get money back from the IRS. Put it in an bank account and get interest.

A money market account is a different story. That's fine, that's where my quarterly payments live. When the OP said "invest" I assumed they meant "put that shit in equities and let it ride".

There's numerous equities (safe and not) to invest in; usually the higher the risk the better the payout. This is really the only choice you get to try and make is how much can I try and save up?

My opinion, and that's all it is, is that the moment the money comes in, some percentage of it is no longer my money. It's the government's, whether I like it or not. I don't play games with other people's money. Making a little safe interest on the quarterly float is fine, but I'm not going to risk losing it, because I don't want to incur their wrath, and I very much don't like being in debt to an entity who can force my 1099 payers to withhold on my behalf.

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I'd rather be safe and in the IRS' good graces than try to earn a margin on their money net of their penalties and interest.

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