TurboTax option to tax now, pay later

Taxes have a way of bleeding you dry. The Beatles put it well when they described the taxman taxing the street, their seats, the heat, and if they aren’t careful, their feet. Every year my poor accountant takes on the increasingly chaotic task of helping me figure out how much I owe in taxes.

I am not proud of it, but there have been seasons of my life where I was delinquent on taxes. Particularly in the era of increasing interest rates… it almost feels like a clever way to take out a loan at a relatively competitive rate. To be fair, I’m not advocating for deferring your tax payments. Please pay them.

Services like TurboTax have long lobbied for unnecessarily complex tax systems to justify their existence. Thankfully, the government is slowly working on a free digital tool to file taxes. This product is still in the early stages, but I’m excited to see more free solutions (like Cash App’s free option to file) start to get rolled out.

But what if a company like TurboTax wanted to help people find a way to defer their payments but still manage it in the app? If we have buy now, pay later, why not have tax now, pay later?

Realistically speaking, if this did exist enough people would abuse it that it would further corrode the financial infrastructure of the U.S. No one would pay, and then… well I don’t know what would happen exactly.

There’s a reason this doesn’t exist but it’d be a wild world if it did.

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