When and how much taxes to pay? (Zurich, C permit)

Hi,

Finally I got a C permit and stopped paying Quellensteuer. Instead, the Zurich tax office sent me a few invoices to allow me to pay the taxes myself.

I got an estimated bill of X CHF (I know I will have to pay a bit more, because I will have earned more this year than last year) and three pay slips:

1 with the full amount due end of September
2 with the amount split in two parts, one due end of September and the other one due end of December

Now I wonder, what would the mustachian people of this forum do in this case? Pay everything (and then some) now? Or pay the minimum required now and the rest at the end of the year (after the bonus will have arrived) such that I can keep investing more right now?

I tend towards the second option. Any drawbacks that I am not thinking about?

Overpaying taxes is not as good as people tell me it used to be, but it’s still a 0.5% interest rate, so much better than what my bank pays me for keeping my cash. Do you overpay? By how much?

Thanks!

G

without spending too much thought, the 0.5% are smaller than the market average of 4-8%, hence, i’d pay the minimum neccessary at any time. other proposals?

Same here. I pay what’s on the bill and on the last day. I will also delay filing my tax declaration as far as I can for free, as they process them in first come first served basis. This could mean delaying additional payment for as long as 6 months, so more cash available to invest.

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I do pay all at once just for the sake of simplicity. Also it’s 0.5% guaranteed and the sum you’ll get is not that big anyway (at least for me, I don’t have a huge salary).
About delaying : For what I understand, the Tax office count also the days you (and them!) waste before sending your decision/money. To be honest I’ve never investigated it that much, so I’m not 100% sure what really happens with all those taxes inside the taxes.

Also note ymmv depending on your Canton. I know by experience.

True, they just processed my 2015 declaration and got back interests on the overpaid taxes for the three years that have passed (in 2015 the interest rate was also higher, I think 1.5%)

By the way, I have a B permit, but I had to submit a tax declaration for 2017. Do you know when should I expect some information if it was OK? And when will they send me some payment slip? Because my calculated tax is more than was already charged with the witholding tax, so I will eventually need to pay the difference.

I mean negative interests. They took me a small amount by calculating when the difference between when I paid and when they decided what to ask me. Or something like that. Every time I see the decision I get upset so I tend to read it once and try to forget how much I paid.

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You will get a correction (they will point out anything that they found wrong and corrected) together with a bill.

It took the tax office 6+ months when I filed my declaration in September 2017, but only 2 months for declaration filed in May 2018.