Tax credits

[jIM_Ohio]

Another tax question-

Regardless if you use a professional or prepare your own tax returns, curious if anyone out there claims the following tax credits:

• Child tax credits
• Additional child tax credit
• Earned Income tax credit
• Hope credit
• Lifetime learning tax credit

I did not know about any of these credits when using turbo tax and they increase my refund. I will blog about how to qualify for these later.

[jIM_Ohio]

I qualify for the child tax credit, and it will increase my refund by 2k this year. I did not know about this credit until recently.

Can a moderator change the poll to allow more than one response to be selected per user?

[creditcardfree]

Did you not know about it because you did not have children? It has been around for several years, right?

We qualify for the child credit and additional child tax credit. One year when DH was deployed we qualified for EITC only because most of his income didn't count as taxable.

Hope and Lifetime learning credits no longer apply to us as we are not in school. They have been around for awhile, too.

[jIM_Ohio]

Originally Posted by creditcardfree

Did you not know about it because you did not have children? It has been around for several years, right?

We qualify for the child credit and additional child tax credit. One year when DH was deployed we qualified for EITC only because most of his income didn't count as taxable.

Hope and Lifetime learning credits no longer apply to us as we are not in school. They have been around for awhile, too.

I knew of the exemptions, but not the additional credits. Our AGI falls just under the 110k limit for the child tax credit.

[cptacek]

We don't have kids yet, and I don't know what the EITC criteria is?

[jIM_Ohio]

Originally Posted by cptacek

We don't have kids yet, and I don't know what the EITC criteria is?

1) SSN for you and spouse (if married) must be valid for working in the US.
2) Have earned income (less than 39,783 MFJ w/ 2 kids; less than 12,590 single w/ no kids; 14590 MFJ w/ no kids). This issue varies depending on if you have kids and what your filing status is- the numbers listed are the max). EITC Thresholds and Tax Law Updates

3) File as single, head of household or married filing jointly
4) US citizen or resident alien for whole year
5) The tax payer is not a qualifying child of someone else
6) Have a qualifying child or be between ages of 25 and 65; live in US half the year and not qualify as someone else's dependant.

I believe the max credit is around $4700. There is a table to look up the credit in.

[cptacek]

Oh, then no. We don't get any of those.