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About half of Americans would rather get a bigger tax refund than an extra $115 per paycheck, according to a recent survey Credit.com conducted. But a bigger tax refund isn’t always a good thing. Learn more about what you can do with a larger paycheck.
Note: This survey was conducted for Credit.com using Suzy.com. The sample consisted of a total of 1,028 responses per question and is not statistically representative of the general population. This survey was conducted in October 2022.
We asked more than 1,000 people aged 18 to 99 whether they’d like a $3,000 tax refund or $115 more in take-home pay on each paycheck. Surprisingly, 52% of the respondents in our tax refund survey said they’d take the bigger tax refund.
Men were more likely to choose the bigger tax refund, at 54.2%, and millennials aged 25 to 34 were the most likely age group to choose the bigger tax refund. People aged 18 to 24 were least likely to say they’d take the bigger tax refund.
It’s important to note that in many cases, getting a tax refund means you overpaid the IRS throughout the year. You could’ve kept the money yourself and put it to work for all those months instead of letting the government earn interest on it. If you’re not sure what your tax refund might look like, see how you can maximize your tax refund so you can plan ahead.
To find out how much money you lose to taxes, learn how to read a pay stub so you can add up your tax payments. If you’re paying too much and getting a refund every year, you can adjust your withholdings to get more out of your paycheck every payday. Here are a few things you can do with a bigger paycheck:
What if you’ve already adjusted your tax withholdings so you’re not losing money every pay period to taxes unnecessarily? If you want more take-home income every month, you may have to look for other ways of earning money, including:
If after everything above you still agree with the 52% of respondents in our survey who said they’d rather have a bigger tax refund, there are some things you can do to get one. They include: