Tips? My first estimated tax payment

[always_learning]

If it's the January 15th payment you need to make, why not just mail a check along with Form 1040-ES.
Gill

I was wanting something pretty much immediate but I will do this as a last resort.

There is no need to split up the payment. With Direct Pay, you can only make 2 payments in 24 hours, so if anything does go wrong, you risk being unable to fix it until the next day. Direct Pay will process payments up to $10M, so mid-five figures is just a small amount to them.

If you don't already have one, register for an online IRS account so you can follow up and verify the payment was received later on. Unfortunately payments submitted between Dec 23 and Jan 22 won't show up there until Jan 24, but at least you'll be able to check then.

I guess I was just concerned about entering something wrong on my end. It might not be a lot of money to the IRS, but it is to me.

If you are over 59 1/2, there is this IRA “trick”

https://financialducksinarow.com/16...bwSCMSPDGrJfC3G6NnwaNfVZPjsZfwCqL_xhzh0xixys8

We aren't yet, but I'm definitely going to look into this.

 

[always_learning]

I’m confused. If you are starting quarterly tax payments in 2022, your first payment will be due April 15th. The January 15th payment is for tax year 2021. That will give you time to set up an EFTPS account.

I’m using EFTPS for the first time this year. Again, something I learned about here.

This is for Q4 of 2021. More than 90% of our income happened in Q4, so I'm just assuming we have to send them money before we file.

I enrolled with EFTPS the week before Christmas, and my letter/pin from the IRS is apparently arriving in today's mail. So a couple of weeks turnaround during a heavy mail season with a couple of holidays in there. Anyone enrolling in EFTPS today *may* get their IRS response in the mail before Jan 15.

Thanks. We ended up registering for EFTPS. Hopefully, the PIN will get here in time.

I set up Direct Pay last year and thought that was laborious. Since my wife's name is primary on our cellphone account, I couldn't use that, so I was one type of ID short. To sign up, they had to mail me a letter with a code on it. Now I see that will be no good by this summer, they are switching to ID.me which will make me start over and require even more documentation. I read on BH that they even need a video call to prove you match the picture on the ID you supply.

I guess once that happens, I will set up EFTPS instead as I don't enjoy jumping through hoops just to send them $.

I never imagined it would be so difficult/confusing to send money to the IRS and have them apply it to us. It looks like each method requires different information, and now one of them is changing? Ugh. Even their site is confusing. It sounds like to request a PIN for the EFTPS we would have to provide photo ID (3 forms of ID is what it said one one page), but we did not. Also on their page, it sounds like Direct Pay is just entering some info, verifying numbers from previous taxes, then we can send them money, but from what you said, it sounds as if Direct Pay wants the all of ID and phone numbers to match? And heaven help us, but we want to register for the IRS.gov accounts but now I'm a bit nervous about that and what they might want. Sheesh.

Thank you so much, everyone, for your help!

 

[MC Rider]

I've been mailing them checks for years. Think I'll just keep doing it that way for now.