Tl;dr - The government won't actually give you money (mostly true), so if the full $4k would bring your actual taxes paid for the year below zero, you can't have it.    The CTC has nothing to do with daycare costs. Those 20-35% numbers are just an indication of what they intend by the credit. Daycare is a deduction though, so that's nice. Anyway, your number probably has something to do with the rest of your tax situation. Your refund can't bring your taxes owed for the year below zero. My own case: I got the full $4k for my 3 and 4 year old this year. However, this has never happened before. In previous years I had other credits and deductions that quickly plummeted my taxes owed to zero. If you pay $10k in taxes during the year, your refund check can't exceed $10k (zero taxes paid). If that tax credit would put your refund check over $10k, that just can't happen, so you get it reduced. Technically, it's not the CTC anymore if that happens; it's the ACTC, which caps at $1400. More reading if you're interested: https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-child-tax-credit ... View more

Just to add to this, a perk of using turbo tax is that it will remember your carryover. I did solar 5 or 6 years ago. I got the ITC in bits and pieces over the next 3-4 years, but every year, turbo tax knew it had to pull the form for it and knew what the carryover balance from the previous year was. Just a little something to make life easier.  ... View more

I agree with tagteam; his plan will definitely work. However, I would start by calling your bank. You have a relationship with them and they can at least point you in the right direction, if not offer you something on the spot. If you have USAA (highly recommended), they have ridiculously helpful customer service.  ... View more

Yeah, your last guess is right. Your score is just a quick reference guide for a lender to see how risky it is to lend you money. If you've been borrowing money and paying people back, you're low risk, so you'll have a higher score. If you've been borrowing money and not paying it back, you're obviously high risk and will have a low score. But if you have no history of borrowing money, you're an unknown. And unknown is risky. Thus low score. Still, worth checking your report to see if anyone has been using your identity to borrow money irresponsibly, but I wouldn't be surprised if you just found it to be empty with no errors.  ... View more

You have to file where you make money. For active duty, your military pay always applies to your home of record. You'll see the tax deductions for that state on all of your LES's. If your spouse works, s/he has to file in the state you live and maybe the state s/he works (depends on whether or not the states have a reciprocal agreement). Ex: My wife is active with home of record WI. We have a rental property in MS. We live in CA (own home) and I don't work. We file in WI and MS, but not CA because none of our income has anything to do with CA. (Made the mistake of trying to file a $0 CA return the first year we lived there. Waste of money.)  Ex2: We live in MS, but don't have a rental property. I work in LA. We had to file in WI, MS, and LA because LA and MS don't have an agreement, so I had to report my income to the state we lived in and the state I worked in.   Sounds bad, but turbo tax sorts everything for you pretty easily.  ... View more

Well, your credit gets "soft" inquiries all the time. That's what all those offers come from. If you read them, the fine print will say something like "subject to credit approval." That's because they didn't actually pull all your info (your whole credit report for review), they just saw your 3 digit number and sent you an offer. Now, if you actually applied for one of these, you would authorize a "hard" inquiry, just like getting a mortgage or car loan. Soft inquiries do absolutely nothing to your credit; they don't even register as events. So no worries about all those offers.  ... View more

This is posted in a forum titled "Credit Score". It literally is filled with thousands of posts of people trying to deal with credit problems and getting advice back from the rest of the community. What possessed you to wake up this morning and declare: "Today, I will not only provide angry and useless input to people I don't care about, but the useless input will also be 100% inaccurate."? ... View more

My score dropped 2 points last month and I did NOTHING. Technically, if I did nothing, the only change to my credit would be that my average length of credit increased slightly, which is good, but... Try not to pay attention to those tiny fluctuations. They're always updating their algorithms or shuffling people into different groups for one reason or another. 2 points probably had nothing to do with a payment you made. Think of it like a stock: it can bounce around a bit, but as long as it's overall track is up, it's good. ... View more

You work really hard for what seems like a long time. If you've dug yourself a hole, there's no magic way out of it. My parents had about a 450 4 years ago. They had multiple credit cards worth of debt, mortgage, 2 cars, 2nd mortgage on the same house, and personal loans. They'd been missing payments because their monthly expenses were so high by this point that if anything abnormal happened for the month, they were screwed. Anyway. They switched to penny pinching and started working a few extra hours. All their extra money went to paying of debt. After about a year of this, they consolidated some of their debt into a new, lower interest rate, loan that was easier to handle. Then, slowly, little things happened. They paid off a car and had an extra few hundred dollars every month. That extra money just became a way to pay off other things faster. They kept penny pinching and working at it. It's been 4 years. They're not done, but have no car loans, no 2nd mortgage, and significantly reduced credit card debt. Their score is now 750, and they have a plan to have themselves completely debt free (except for the mortgage) in 5 more years. Live within your means and work hard. That's it. You can look up The Dave Ramsey Show on YouTube for some extra guidance. He's got a good baby steps program for people who are buried in debt with crap credit and apparently it works really well. I just discovered him yesterday while browsing for something related and his brand of help might be right up your alley. ... View more