Income Spreading

Categories: Tax

Working a job where your income is really high one month and really low the next? Maybe you’re a movie star, basketball player, investor, or freelancer.

You’ve got the right idea: income spreading.

Income spreading is a way to reduce your taxes by spreading out your income over time, making your income look less volatile than it actually is. Income spreading can reduce your taxes by putting you in a lower tax bracket, or just by reducing the marginal tax rate over the long run.

Income spreading isn’t one set strategy...there are lots of different ways to do it. To be clear, income spreading is different than income averaging, which is a tax privilege for people like farmers in the U.S. Rather, it could involve selling a capital asset, then collecting regular payments on the asset over time.

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: What is a Tax Bracket?24 Views

00:00

finance a la shmoop what is a tax bracket alright taxes maxes who needs

00:09

them right well in this country we live under what is called a quote progressive [Map of USA appears]

00:14

tax system unquote and yes it is a politically charged name like

00:19

progressive sounds like it can't possibly be a bad thing but can it well [Progressive in the fire]

00:24

in the taxes sense progressive means that the more money you make the more

00:29

you get taxed which can be viewed as a punishment for being financially

00:34

successful where's Ayn Rand anyway to help us celebrate mediocrity sloth and [Ayn Rand appears]

00:39

socialism hmm okay okay we're just framing tax brackets here don't get all

00:43

in a tizzy it's the brackets that set the

00:46

incremental rates at which the financially more successful are taxed

00:51

and those tax brackets change all the time so we won't even bother with the [Tax bracket transforms into cocoon]

00:55

real numbers of today as we're sure they'll be totally different in a few

00:59

years but the basic idea is that as in the following completely made-up example

01:03

you'll pay federal income taxes of zero tax in bracket one here on the first and

01:10

a seven grand that you earn move over to bracket two and from seven grand to 20

01:15

grand you'll pay 10 percent tax or ten percent on that incremental 13 grand or

01:20

1,300 bucks move to bracket three and from 20 to 50 grand you'll pay 20 [Income tax bracket table appears]

01:25

percent or six grand tax on that 30 grand spread from 20 to 50 right here

01:30

move to the next bracket which will cleverly named 4 and you pay 30 percent

01:34

tax from 50 grand to 120 grand or 0.3 times at 70 grand spread or 21 in

01:41

taxes at bracket 5 in this very made-up example you'll pay 40 percent tax from a

01:46

hundred 20 grand to infinity so if you made half a million dollars last year

01:50

chasing corporate ambulances as a sewer you know a lawyer who sues corporations [Lawyer chasing ambulance in a car]

01:56

when their stocks go down then you'll pay 40 percent tax on the last three

02:01

hundred 80 grand you earned or point four times three eighty or a hundred

02:04

fifty two grand so why do the brackets matter like why do some people whine on

02:10

and on about how making that extra 112 dollars

02:13

will put them into the next tax bracket and well then they're really screwed why [Man crying in office chair]

02:18

oh why because they're idiots or at least they didn't watch this video

02:22

because the next tax bracket on its own doesn't mean anything other than the

02:26

fact that on the incremental dollars you earned you'll pay taxes at that higher [Earnings bracket highlighted]

02:31

rate so in the immortal words of Iran well okay yeah she isn't saying much

02:36

these days never mind [Ayn Rand grave appears]

Find other enlightening terms in Shmoop Finance Genius Bar(f)