April 15, a day most of us dread, is here. Have you filed your taxes yet?
Economists believe most people are rational calculating machines, but many of us don’t behave rationally about filing our taxes.
Instead, most of us wait until the very last minute. Figures from the end of March suggest roughly 50 million—or one-third of all this year’s individual tax returns in the United States—will have been filed in the final two weeks before Tax Day.
This is NOT a good idea for most of us.
I experienced this procrastination during the past weekend when I was finally able to convince one of my sons to sit down and do his income taxes. He was very happy when the final tabulation showed a good-sized refund. Walking out the door, my son said if he had known it would be a refund, he would have done his taxes much earlier.
Most of Us Owe Nothing
Waiting till the last minute is strange for a number of reasons. First, the majority of people in the United States either get a refund or don’t owe the federal government any money. The graph below produced from IRS data shows the percentage of filed tax returns that are due a refund. Since the 1950s a rising number of people have overpaid. About 8 out of every 10 tax returns filed in 2013 got a refund.
