Ah, spring. The time of year when flowers bloom, birds sing, and the entire internet starts yelling at you for getting a tax refund or - even worse - getting a tax refund and then spending it.

The horror.

The conventional wisdom goes something like this: You shouldn't get a tax refund, because it means that your HR department deducted too much tax from your paycheque, and you've been giving the government a tax-loan all year, you dummy.

Or this: The only thing you should spend your tax refund on is an RRSP contribution, because then your taxes will be lower this year, too, creating a virtuous circle of lower taxes for your income-earning lifetime. (You dummy.)

They’re all missing the point.

The problem here is one that finance writers themselves caution you against: your tax refund isn’t somehow a separate class of money than the stuff that’s deposited to your bank account every two weeks, and thinking about it differently than you think about your paycheque leads to the finger-wagging advice above...or a guilty feeling for not following it.

Let’s think of it in a different way, and maybe it will help: your tax refund is part of last year’s income, and you’re getting it today instead of with your paycheques last year. What would you have done with it if you’d been getting it all year rather than a month from now?

This is a good argument for asking to reduce your income tax deductions at source if you regularly get a refund because you pay union dues, childcare costs, contribute to your RRSP or donate to charity (among other things). Not because of the interest-free government loan malarky, but because you’ll be able to spend the income you earn when you earn it, instead of the following year. Be careful, though: if you’re not totally sure that you’ve calculated correctly, or that your tax situation this year will be the same as last year, maybe a tax free loan to the government with a refund in April is a better scenario than the reverse, especially if the resulting tax bill comes as a surprise.

Let me put it another way: what's the goal of paying less in taxes? If your answer is “ummm...to pay less taxes?”...think of the possibilities you’re missing! (Also, you’d be a great finance writer.) Unless your goal in life is to stick it to the man, or to stop funding Provincial Program X or Federal Program Y (good luck with that, by the way), you probably want to give the government less of your money so you can use it to do the things you want to do with it.

Take the big picture view, and look at a refund as just another piece of your total income pie (mmmm….pie….). Use the total pie to spend on the things that are important to you, whether that’s as part of your overall debt reduction efforts, saving to quit your job, or finally paying for that activity your kids have been dying to join.

Treating your income tax refund as a special class of money that can only be used to do virtuous things actually encourages the other bad behaviours finance writers are bugging you about all the time: you’re in danger of relying on a future windfall to solve your spending or saving problems.

Don’t do that.

The point: Trusting the government to tell you what you need to give them and when is like asking your three-year-old to make supper: remarkably inefficient. This post ends with an appeal to write your MP begging for a change in the way small businesses are notified of their HST responsibilities, so be warned: it's impassioned.

Here's a good way to waste an afternoon: go to the Canada Revenue Agency website and try to find out if your small business has to collect HST and when you have to remit it.

Go ahead.

I dare you.

This isn't a Taxes Are Hard, So Hire An Accountant post. By all means, hire an accountant who has passed the CPA exam requirements if you don't have the time or the interest to figure out your own taxes. I like accountants. They're good people, and precise doesn't even cut it as an adjective.

No, this is a Read The Manual If You're Going To Do Your Own Taxes post. A cautionary tale, if you like, and a reminder that the government doesn't care about your time and money, except for the money that's owed to them.

Imagine a plumbing business owned by a fairly precise and all around upstanding guy named Bill. Bill started Bill's Plumbing in Ontario three years ago, and - because he's precise and upstanding - Bill read through the Canada Revenue Agency's General Information for GST/HST Registrants and knows that as soon as his business makes $30,000 in four consecutive quarters, he'll have to start collecting HST.

Bill faithfully checked his income every quarter, and finally the big day came. He registered for an HST account, put this HST number on his invoices, and started collecting. He opened a separate business account and transferred every penny of tax he collected to it.

He knows he's never going to make $1,500,000 a year, so he'll always be an annual filer (that's here in the guide). So he filed his first HST return and paid $4,133 on April 30th. He got a Notice of Assessment back, and a remittance voucher for the next year's taxes marked due the following April.The next year he repeats the cycle, except this time Bill gets a notice that he owes $135 in interest and penalties because he was supposed to be paying quarterly installments throughout the past year.

This is the first time Bill's heard of it. He heads back to the HST Guide to look up installments again. Sure enough, it reads: "if you are an annual filer and your net tax for a fiscal year is $3,000 or more, you may have to make quarterly installment payments throughout the following fiscal year."

Bill remembers reading that (here) when he was setting up his HST, but - because of the word "may", Bill thought that installment payments were something the CRA told you about.

As in, "Thanks for being such a fine, upstanding citizen and filing your first HST return, Bill. Because you collected $4,133 last fiscal year on our behalf, this year we want you to send it to us in equal installments every three months."

HA. It is to laugh.

Let me repeat the phrase that Bill is now so familiar with he had his wife embroider it on a sampler to hang over his desk: "the onus is on the taxpayer to figure out when his remitting requirements change."

That means that - although someone in a tax office somewhere (probably PEI, those bastards) received Bill's return in April of last year, and flipped some switch deep in the bowels of the tax system so that another someone at another desk would expect Bill to predict the amount of HST he'd collect for an entire year, divide it by four, and remit it every three months, nobody told Bill that.

The moral of the story? Hire an accountant.

No, better yet, write to your MP. Tell him what a cock-eyed, Byzantine way that is to collect sales tax. Write him an impassioned letter begging him to re-think the government's insistence on wasting valuable entrepreneurial time. Entreat him to make this statement from the Economic Action Plan (2013) actually true, instead of a pretty little throwaway sentence:

"The CRA is helping small business owners avoid costly and time consuming audits by raising awareness of their tax obligations in order to help them to get it right from the start."

You can find him here. Mine is Tony Clement. Who's yours?

The point of this post: don't pay your taxes with your credit card. Ever.

The big news today (for money nerds who read every scrap of money-related news, that is) is that through the online payment system Plastiq, you can put your income tax payment on your credit card.

Don't.

There is no conceivable situation where this is a good idea.

If you're trying to be smart and collect points or rewards on your credit card...

You're not, because you'll have to pay a 2% fee on top your payment. To get 2% cash back on the CIBC Dividend World Elite card (for example), you have to have spent $35,000 on it first just to break even on the fee you paid for paying your taxes with the card, let alone thinking about breaking even on the annual fee of the card. If you have a no fee rewards card, your point tiers are even lower, and therefore more impossible to use to your advantage.

Now, if all the conditions are right - as in, your fee is waived for the year, or you're in the middle of a promotional points bonus period - then you might choose to trade off the 2% fee for the extra points you'll get on the tax balance you owe, to which I say: be careful.

Not only do you have to be diligent in knowing the conditions of your card so that you don't end up paying interest, you also have to know the value of the points you're receiving. If, as in this example (paying $2000 in taxes and $40 in fees to get 2040 points) you actually redeem your points regularly, and your points have a redemption value of more than the $40 you're spending to get them, then by all means, pay your taxes with your credit card.

Carefully.

If You Don't Have the Money in Cash When Your Taxes Are Due (and are surprised that you owe).

Hopefully this is a one-off situation. You prepare your taxes, and find out that for any one of many possible scenarios your taxes weren't deducted properly and now you owe the tax man, you're much (much) better off to pay interest to Revenue Canada than to any credit card.

As long as you file your taxes on time, you won't be charged with a penalty. Until you're paid up, you'll be charged a compounding rate of 5% on the outstanding balance, which means that any interest you owe in May is added to your total, and interest is charged on it too the next month.

Guess what? If you put it on your credit card and don't pay it off in full within 21 days, or - and this is important, so pay attention - you are already carrying a balance from last month - you're going to be charged a compounding rate of whatever your credit card balance interest rate is, usually somewhere around 19%, because if you're carrying a balance over you've lost your interest free grace period.

Your next job is to figure out why you owed taxes for last year and how you can plan better for this year so you either don't owe again, or have enough money set aside when the time comes to pay.

If You Don't Have the Money in Cash When Your Taxes Are Due (and knew you were going to owe)

Oh my. What can I say to you that won't make you feel bad?

If you consistently have a tax balance to pay every year - small business owners, I'm looking at you here - and don't have an annual plan to save that money up, then you're just asking for trouble, so stop it.

Get a plan in place. Pay your income taxes in installments throughout the year, or set money aside in a separate, untouchable income tax account, and talk to an accountant to look for ways to decrease the amount of income tax you have to pay at all.

By putting your income taxes on your credit card, you're voluntarily stepping onto the hamster wheel of perpetual debt.

So don't.