NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How Tariffs Could Impact Your Retirement and What to Know for 2025 Taxes
06 Mar 2025
Should you worry about market volatility and your retirement savings?
Estimating your taxes includes finding your total gross income from the last year, factoring in things like credits and deductions and more. Using an online income tax calculator like NerdWallet can help simplify the process.
I love that you added that people have to still pay their taxes because I will not lie, I might have forgotten that part. And also good suggestion on the calculator, Bella. I'm a calculator girl. So for everyone listening, we will have a link to NerdWallet's federal income tax calculator in today's show notes.
Or you can just search in Google or whatever search engine you use, NerdWallet tax calculator.
Yeah, go check that out if you're interested. And the last deadline-related thing I'll touch on is if you're due a refund, there's no penalty for filing late, but you might want to file on time anyway to get your money back sooner. And although you might not be penalized for filing late, you may still be obligated to file a return based on the IRS's rules.
Alright, so are there any big changes this year that people should be aware of?
Every year, the IRS makes what we call inflation adjustments, which means things like the tax brackets, standard deductions, certain tax credits, and more are shifted. And these shifts tend to work out in the favor of us taxpayers. We can dive into how that plays out, starting with tax brackets. Although the seven income tax rates don't typically change year to year, tax brackets do.
For example, last tax filing season, as a single filer, the first $11,000 of your income would have been taxed at 10%, whereas this filing season, the first $11,600 is taxed at 10%, keeping more of your income from reaching that higher tax rate. And then I also want to touch on how the standard deduction has changed this year. We can use that same single filer example.
Last year, if you took the standard deduction, you would have gotten a $13,850 deduction. Whereas this year, under the same circumstances, you'll get a $14,600 deduction. This means an extra $750 of your income isn't subject to tax.
So last year, we talked about the IRS's free tax filing program. Bella, what's the current status of that? Is it still intact after the slicing and dicing of the federal government that we've seen over the past several weeks?
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