THE Senate is set to vote on the coronavirus relief package and taxpayers in the meantime can take steps to ensure they get the most of the up to $1,400 payments.
Third stimulus checks are included in the massive relief bill that the House approved on Saturday and is headed to the Senate.
Under the proposal, the third checks would amount to $1,400 for individuals with adjusted gross incomes of up to $75,000 and the thresholds are $112,500 for heads of households and $150,000 for married couples filing together.
President Joe Biden urged the Senate to act quickly on the legislation, and Democrats want to get it to his desk to sign into law by mid-March.
That means that the stimulus checks could be only a few weeks away from being sent to taxpayers.
Filing taxes sooner rather than later could lead to maximum payouts for many Americans, according to Yahoo Finance.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) uses the adjusted gross income in the most recent tax return to determine the amount of the third direct payment.
Adjusted gross income is taxable income minus the standard deductible or itemized deductions.
Americans who want to maximize their payouts should log in to a tax software program and file their 2020 return immediately, if their household income dropped last year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Doing that will mean the IRS will go off the 2020 return instead of the higher 2019 tax return.
The thresholds set for the third stimulus check are the same as the ones in the first two direct payments.
However, the Senate may decide to lower the thresholds to benefit Americans who are struggling the most, a decision that Biden would approve of, according to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.
“There has been a targeting to ensure that it hits the Americans who need that help the most,” Psaki said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.
“That’s an idea that has come up in meetings with Democrats and Republicans and he’s certainly open to hearing from their ideas.”
Families who meet the income requirements will get $1,400 per person in the household, including dependents.
That means that a family of five with two parents and three children would get $7,000 total, instead of $3,000 from previous stimulus rounds in which only dependents under 17 years old received money.
The third stimulus payments phase out until $100,000 annual income for individual filers, $150,000 for heads of household and $200,000 for couples filing jointly.
