profitable

I found a nice little web page on the Franchise Tax Board website for California taxpayers. This page, has the links to BOTH the Calfiornia DE-4 and the Fed W-4 withholding calculators.

Just a heads up that the California one is in Excel format, so you will need the spreadsheet program to make your calculations. The Fed calculator is fill-in right on the internet.

It is very profitable to take a quarterly check up to make sure that you are having enough taxes taken out of your pay stub. Sometimes Human Resource Departments make mistakes! Sometimes numbers get transposed and even worse, sometimes software table updates with new tax rates don’t get loaded properly into payroll systems! I’ve seen it all…

My clients always come to me and ask if they are taking enough out of their pay, too much and how can they “guesstimate” what they need to have taken out so they are either even at the end of year for both the Fed and State of California or so they only owe a little. I either do the forecasting myself for the clients that don’t like to work with numbers or send the self-acting clients directly to this link. They can go ahead and calculate what they plan on their withholding to be. They may have changes like a relative coming to move in with them and they can adjust the withholding accordingly. Maybe you are getting married.

Now if you are a good tax professional, you should be doing your own questioning and guesstimating along with them to see if what they are having taken out is reasonable. Reasonableness is a big word to me and to the taxing authorities because if something looks out of kilter, the chances are that it might get a closer look. I always look twice and then ask a client if there is anything weird when I get their W-2s to make sure things were taken out properly.

I strongly urge you, dear reader, to always look at your pay stubs throughout the year if you are working for somebody and check to make sure that a reasonable amount of tax money (what you should be paying) is being taken out. Both the Fed and State of California respect the “pay as you go” plan.

For more detailed questions, drop me an email or check with your tax pro.

I am never one to “withhold” my experience with you, dear readers!

Kim Isaac Greenblatt

You are reading Kim Isaac Greenblatt’s blog, profitable, and where to find the DE-4.

Tags: Business, California withholding, DE-4, Fed withholding, Kim Isaac Greenblatt, profitable, taxes, W-4

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 12:09 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.