Can’t Afford to preserve for Retirement? The Retirement Saver’s Tax Credit Could Help you

If you're like other Americans, you may be having problems finding a way to preserve for the retirement or do any type of income tax break. Even with the tax break, workers that make less than $40 - 50,000 annually may be strapped to find room in their budgets for a qualified strategy contribution, particularly if they've dependents. Once the home loan, automobile payment, insurance coverage, utilities and other month to month cost of living have been paid, there may be little or nothing left to conserve.

But now there is a income tax break instrument for cash-strapped employees to have the ability to either begin or at least increase their retirement savings by a couple of hundred dollars each year. The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Act of 2001 produced a new retirement incentive known as the Retirement Saver's Tax Credit. This is a nonrefundable credit that can decrease any qualified taxpayer's total tax owed on a dollar-for-dollar basis, based upon how much the citizen contributes to their retirement plan or IRA.

Credit Rate	Married Filing Jointly	Head of Household	All other filers
50%	$0-$33,500	$0-$25,125	$0-$16,750
20%	$31,501-$36,000	$25,126-$27,000	$16,751-$18,000
10%	$36,001-$55,500	$27,001-$41,625	$18,001-$27,750

For being eligible, you must be at least eighteen years old and can't be a full-time student with another person claiming you as a dependent upon their taxes. This income tax break instrument may be used in addition to any deductions that you can declare as a result of creating retirement strategy contributions. Any participation to a conventional or Roth IRA, SEP, Simple Individual retirement account, 401(k), 403(b) or 457 plan will count towards the credit. The amount of the credit will vary from 10% to 50% of your eligible contribution amount up to $2,000. This places the highest feasible credit amount at $1,000 (as much as $2,000 credit if filing jointly and each partner contributes $2,000 or even more to a retirement strategy). The chart breaks down the amount of credit that can be claimed.

The lower your modified gross income is, the greater the credit. For example, if you are married filing jointly, your AGI less than $33,500, and you each make Roth IRA contributions of $2,000, you'll receive the full credit of $1,000 each (a total of $2,000). As a result, if you find yourself above these revenue thresholds but just a little, some income tax break will help you engineer your revenue to possibly meet the criteria for the credit.

If you are behind in conserving for retirement and want to make use of this income tax break opportunity to start catching up, make use of what IRS offers.