Get Ready for People to Tell You How to Spend Your Tax Savings

Photo credit: zack Mccarthy, CC BY 2.0.

I still don’t have a perfectly clear idea of how the new tax laws will affect me — I’m going to be talking to a CPA on Friday, and I predict the conversation will go along the lines of “we don’t know for sure, but this is what we think…” — but the general consensus is that a lot of us might save a little money? Maybe? At least for the next few years?

At the NYT, Ron Lieber has some suggestions on how we can spend the tax savings we haven’t yet received. He starts by suggesting we give it to the people who work for us, both on the business and personal level:

If you don’t employ anyone at the moment, hiring occasional part-time help to buy back your own time may contribute to greater personal happiness, as a recent study showed, in addition to putting more money in someone else’s pocket.

Ah, that 2017 classic. Happiness comes from paying someone else to do your chores!

Lieber doesn’t mention what you should do if the people you hire are gig economy contractors. Is there a way to give my Lyft driver a raise? (I guess I could start tipping the highest amount instead of the middle one.)

The rest of his suggestions involve buying local and buying American — on the theory that the more you spend, the more jobs will stay in the U.S. — as well as donating to charities. He even has a hashtag: #giveitback.

I suspect we’ll see more pieces like this in the next month: put your tax savings in your retirement fund, put your tax savings in your kid’s college fund, use your tax savings to pay down debt, etc. etc. etc. These are all good suggestions, but none of us really know how much we’re going to save yet — if we get any tax savings at all.

So it’s a little soon to start imagining how we’ll spend it, right?

Or are you already thinking about what you might do with your slightly higher paychecks and/or 2018 refund?

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