Educational Video

Tax Extensions help you avoid penalties if you aren’t ready to file. The individual form is called IRS Form 4868, and it is very easy to fill out. Here is a video tutorial, updated for 2020 Tax Extensions (on your 2019 Taxes).

If you need to make a payment, you can do so electronically. So that’s another option for you. See IRS, make a payment – if you Google that, you’ll get into their payment window. So here, you can either pay right from your bank account or with a debit card. If you’re going to pay with a card of some sort, they’re going to charge you some fees. If we have cash in the bank, and we’re going to pay this. You can make a payment, you click on these things, and you’re going to fill these in.

If you’re paying for your extension, you’re going to click right on there, reason, and it auto fills in the form. Remember, we were filling out IRS Form 4868. Here you go. It’s applying it to form 4868, and supplying it to the right tax period, 2019, last year. You hit continue. And you’re going to confirm, yes, I’m doing this.

Then it’s going to ask you for all kinds of personal information, which I am not going to fill out in this video. And you would hit continue.Eventually you would put in your bank account information and whatnot. So the IRS will know that if you’ve paid, that you’re going on extension.

I would still send in this form anyway, because no harm, no foul. Things can go wrong, if you don’t send in the form, if you do send in the form, and you didn’t need to, oh well, add it to the growing pile of dead trees that the IRS contributes to.

So super simple, get those done.

Hopefully that’ll take care of a bunch of people who are panicking at the last second that they need to get their extension done. Here’s just a thing to think about, this is a triple whammy tax deadline. Why is that? Because as you see, your 2019 stuff is due. And don’t forget an extension of time to file is not an extension of time to pay. So you’re still supposed to have these taxes paid in by now, IRS Form 4868 will avoid non-filing penalties, not interest or late payment penalties.

Also for 2020, the year we’re currently in, your first and your second quarter are also due now. So if you’ve had a really crappy year and you’ve made no money, it might not matter. But if you’ve been having a good year, and things are going well – I’ve got a lot of clients where they’re doing shockingly well – so lawyer clients, people on IT, etc, get those estimated payments in. If you’re in the restaurant business, that’s another story.

So if you’re having a great year right now in 2020, then you might owe two quarters of 2020, plus whatever you owed for the end of 2019. So triple whammy. Get your extension in. You’re still going to owe money. If you owe money, pay it. Great. If not, you do what you got to do. But now at least you know how to file the form. And how to get it set up.

So if you need a tax extension, fill out IRS Form 4868.

If you’re interested, I also have a business book club that you can join, it’s on Facebook – Bette’s Business Book Club.