I have income from multiple sources and they are not aware of each other. For example, they will all keep paying social security even when I’ve exceeded the max deduction. It is far too complicated to correct the finance departments of multiple companies. I just reconcile it all at the end of the year and get a refund. Got a better strategy I can use?
Woah, it’s okay to have different tax situations. I started a business one year and got a pretty big refund. But we’re not out there bragging about how we get big refunds every year like it’s some goal to aim for and accomplishment to be proud of if achieved. That’s the mentality people are criticizing.
It sounds like you’re not one of the people they met who use it like a piggy bank. From my perspective, they’re just describing the habits of people who are used to not having any money: gotta spend this windfall quick because money doesn’t last long. It’s irrational and ultimately harmful but it’s borne from the practice of spending all of your money every month on non-trivial things and still being required to increase debt in order to stay in your apartment, e.g., credit card spending.
It's not necessarily irrational. For example, for some people if they ever have any extra money, someone else will immediately spend it for them. If the earner wants to make a larger purchase, perhaps something that will cost short term but pay off in the long term, they need some mechanism to save, outside of the regular controls that apply to daily life.
You may think this situation is still irrational, that the other person is being irrational. But again, there are many life situations out there. Perhaps they have lived in situations where they had to fight for what they needed. Perhaps they lived with an earner who would spend their money on drugs if it wasn't taken away, and yet if the non-earner saved it up themselves, the earner would find it and spend it.
The supposedly rational thing may depend on everyone around you to also be rational, and everyone around them, etc. And given that we are human, and humans are not fully rational...
If your separate income streams are pretty predictable and so is the overwitholding, and if you care enough: you can put a negative number in the "extra witholding" box on your W-4.
I wouldn't say this is a better strategy, but you can definitely min/max this even if your income is not stable by extrapolating out your expected income and expected witholding a few times a year and adjusting your W-4 based on your calculations.
Not sure about state, but you don't pay Federal Income and FICA separately. They are just numbers that get added together. You just pay money, and the IRS splits it up after they collect. If you "overpay" Income by $1000 and "underpay" FICA by a $1000, you're done, no problem.
I think the W-4 only applies to federal income tax. There's no field that instructs employers how much to pay in FICA (their share and yours). At best you can reduce withholdings to account for the excess FICA payments.
FICA cap is not per employer. Well, it is from a withholding perspective (only because it would be impractical to make employers monitor withholding outside their control), but once you do your taxes for that year, you’ll get everything you paid in over the cap refunded.
