Saturday, June 15, 2024

Why I Paid Off my Income Tax One-time in Full?

 



In life, the only constants are Taxes and Death.

It is the heart wrenching time of the year as we receive Notice of Assessment from IRAS.

My income taxes of ~$3.8k are due by 1 Jul 2024.

I have explored ways to earn miles through paying taxes using payment platforms such as CardUp, IPayMy or CitiPayall.

The lowest admin fee is 1.75% and I am unable to get the $30 new user discount as my accounts do not qualify as new user.

Effectively, I would be buying a mile for $0.014 if I use CardUp or ipaymy with Citibank Premiermiles card from incurring $60+ admin fee.

I decided to skip earning miles from tax payment this year. I will just pay off using Citibank Premiermiles card on AXS without any benefit, saving up $60+ from buying miles while enjoying deferred tax payment of 1 mth from the credit card cycle. In today's high interest rate environment, the yield from $3.8k for 1 mth at 3% p.a is around $10.

There it goes.


Why not GIRO instalments? I hated continual liabilities and by paying off the taxes one-off, it gives me a peace of mind and greater freedom feeling of being debtless.

Thanks for reading.

Regards,
Roy

2 comments:

mysecretinvestment said...

Hi Qiongster

Paying off your income tax in one go is ok if your income tax is not a substantial amount. I used to do that in my early years of working.

But when the income tax started to cross five figures, I decided that it was better to take up the interest free giro monthly payment stretched out over a year. The rest of the money could be used to buy T-bills, SSB or even stocks in the meantime.

Also while paying income taxes is painful, it is a reminder that we have an income! And the higher the income tax we pay, the higher the income we earned! And I think no high income earner would want to go back to earning less just so that they pay less taxes.😜

Qiongster said...

Hi mysecretinvestment, well said. Thanks for sharing.