Every year about a quarter of Americans wait until the last minute to do their taxes.

“Really half the battle is just gathering the info, once you have the info filling the tax return is actually not that hard,” said Steven Elwell, Level Financial Advisors Vice President.  

The IRS expects more than 10 million people will request an extension.

You can fill out form 4868 today April 17th to get a six month extension, making your new tax deadline October 15th but that doesn’t mean you’re completely off the hook.

Even if you file for an extension, today is still the deadline to pay the taxes you owe. If you don’t do that today, penalty and interest charges can rack up meaning you’ll likely owe more money.

To find out how much you owe you can look at last year’s return. You could also use tax software and plug in your information to figure out how much you owe.

“The simplest place to start is last year’s tax return. What did last year look like, how have things changed from last year, did I make more money did I make less money,” said Elwell.

If you don’t have the money to pay, you can apply for an IRS installment plan which will give you a 120 day extension to pay the bill.

Elwell says you should be careful about how you file electronically.

“You’re going to want to be very careful if you’re using your phone or if you were doing your tax return just on a laptop or iPad in a public setting on public wifi. That’s probably not a very good idea because of so much sensitive information when you’re filing your return,” said Elwell.

LINKS:

You can file for a six-month extension with Form 4868 online by April 17th: https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/extension-of-time-to-file-your-tax-return
 
If you don’t have the money to pay what you owe, you can apply for a 120-day extension to pay the bill: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f9465.pdf