The tediousness of the form depends a lot on the individual. If you have pension checks or SS checks that are constant, those are easy. If you are working part time with varying hours, you need to sum up each gross paycheck by quarter. If you have assets in taxable that produce dividends or capital gains/losses, you need to add those up by quarter. A handful of assets isn't too hard. If you are doing direct indexing or a lot of tax loss harvesting, you could have a lot of data points to add up. Have a bunch of CDs, individual bonds, or HYSA's paying interest every month or some months. Need to go add those up. Did you take random IRA or 401K distributions (or Roth conversions), need to put those in the proper quarter if so.
Estimated tax payment by quarter you probably already know and entered. And withholding I think the totals just matter not the when, so tax withholding isn't as burdensome as income accounting.
I gathered this in a spreadsheet by month so it wasn't hard. But there was a lot of looking at paychecks, pension statements, bank statements, etc in order to get all the data entered. For me, it took about an hour to gather everything and tabulate. This is especially true with most info now being online and no one sending paper so you have to go to a website, look at each pension or paycheck or account, tabulate, and repeat.
Estimated tax payment by quarter you probably already know and entered. And withholding I think the totals just matter not the when, so tax withholding isn't as burdensome as income accounting.
I gathered this in a spreadsheet by month so it wasn't hard. But there was a lot of looking at paychecks, pension statements, bank statements, etc in order to get all the data entered. For me, it took about an hour to gather everything and tabulate. This is especially true with most info now being online and no one sending paper so you have to go to a website, look at each pension or paycheck or account, tabulate, and repeat.
Statistics: Posted by suemarkp — Tue Feb 17, 2026 4:15 pm — Replies 3 — Views 247