IRS Refund: How To Get Your Federal Income Tax Refund Fast

“Congratulations,
You’re Getting A IRS Refund!”

These are the golden words that every taxpayer wants to hear. Federal income tax refunds occur when the tax you owe is less than the sum of the total amount of rebate tax credits claimed and the total amount of withholding paid.

For many individual tax payers those federal tax refunds can be obtained through Earned Income Credit, a real refund of overpayment of tax, or through an overpayment from previous years.

Some people really believe that getting a large income tax refund is not the greatest thing. Instead they feel that the tax refund represents a loan paid back by the government interest free. Others use their IRS tax refund as a “simple savings plan” where they are surprised to get money back each year. Always remember that it is still better to get an IRS tax refund than to owe money to the government.

Once you have determined you are receiving a tax refund, there are a few options available that will actually return that money to a taxpayer. The traditional standard of filing paper tax returns, electronic filing with direct deposit, rapid refunds, and refund anticipation loans are the options we have the choice of exercising. For many IRS refund anticipating individuals, the rapid refund or the refund anticipation loan is the refund of choice.

IRS Refunds

Since the advent of the computer age, along with the magnificent invention of the internet, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has been reasonably quick to react to the benefit of electronic filing of tax returns. The income tax returns are filed so much faster, tax refunds are made quickly, and the IRS can also collect their money due faster. Let us take a few moments to compare the different IRS refund options, and what each offers the individual taxpayer.

Rapid IRS Refund

With the standard paper filing system that many people are still more familiar with, is slowly attaining obsolescence. Soon there will come a time that the historic method of paper filing of taxes will be entirely replaced by e-filing (electronic filing) methods. If you still remain one of the dying numbers of American taxpayers who files a paper tax return, you should anticipate receiving a tax refund from the IRS in about six weeks from the date they make record of receiving it. However today, six weeks or more to receive a tax refund seems like an exceptionally long time.

The rapid tax refund is quickly replacing that of filing with paper tax returns. It is an electronic online method used for filing your federal income tax return. A rapid tax refund can be obtained by filing your tax return electronically. When you file electronically you will usually receive your IRS refund in about 10-14 days; hence, a rapid refund compared to that of a paper tax return. Much faster than the six plus weeks it used to take. There are usually no excess fees attached to this type of filing, and less complex tax returns may be filed for free from home and through many local and public access facilities.

IRS Refund Anticipation Loans

The refund anticipation loan, is a quite different in that you can access your IRS refund dollars in most instances by the next business day, sometimes sooner. These loans are usually administered and offered by a tax professional through an established alliance with a financial lending institution. There are several excellent choices available, and there are many qualified tax professionals to assist you to complete your tax return and process the tax refund loan documents. You will be required to pay a loan fee and/or a small interest fee for the opportunity to obtain the refund anticipation loan. There are some restrictions placed on obtaining a refund anticipation loan, and some of those restrictions may affect a sizable number of people. For example, if you were to owe back taxes, back child support, or have tax liens and judgments, you can’t qualify for the refund anticipation loan. Very often, the individual taxpayers who apply for and use refund anticipation loans are recipients of earned income credit, and their IRS tax refunds are usually well into the thousands of dollars. The refund anticipation loan can be processed in as little as three hours, and back in the hand of the taxpayer by late afternoon or the next day; this is provided that everything works exactly according to plan.

Direct Deposit Is Best Choice For IRS Refund

The high interest rates charged by the bank lending institutions, and the higher processing fees charged by the tax preparation professional, equate to less money for the you. But many taxpayers do not even blink when they are informed of how much it will cost to process their federal tax return. They just want or in some cases need the refund so badly and immediately they do not seem to care. This is just another example of the instant gratification upon which our society chooses to function. For individuals e-filing their returns, that opt to have their IRS funds direct deposited, the turn around time is usually only no more than 10 to 15 days. You would think that a turn-around of less than two weeks would be fast enough for most taxpayers. But typically the way it seems to work is the larger the federal income tax refund, the more urgent the need for the cash and comparatively the smaller the cost appears to be. Perhaps trust, or the absence of trust for the IRS has something to do with it also. I would guess that a fairly large number of individuals do not have confidence in the IRS to refund their money that quickly, or perhaps they are not confident they will receive their refund at all if left in the coffers of the IRS.

It would appear to me that this is just another way for tax preparation services and lending institutions to make profit from the poor to low income people; as it is usually the lower income people that qualify for the earned income credit tax refunds. They can be extremely large, especially for families with two to three dependents or more. If at all possible, avoid tax refund loans. They are extremely expensive. Try to wait patiently so you can keep for yourself every penny of your IRS Refund.