Does anybody know how these stimulus checks work. I got the first one real fast.
I have friends living all around me and their names all start with different letters and they got their checks. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.
Have you checked the status of your stimulus check with the IRS’s website here:
I’d start there and see what it says (when you click “Get My Payment”).
If you’re on Social Security, the SS department just got around to sending the account information to the IRS this weekend. They’ll start sending paper checks out on Wednesday.
Yes, I did, but that doesn’t really help me.
Why not? What did it say?
You’ve got to help us help you by providing more details instead of having cochrane and I throw darts in the dark at what your situation might be.
Thanks so much for posting this! I’d just checked my bank account on Friday, had no payment, went to the “Get My Payment” site and got the totally unhelpful either ‘not determined yet’ or ‘not eligible’ result. So I just checked now and it says my payment will go out on the 7th.
Whew! I was afraid I’d have to tackle filing extra reports or arguing or something.
After thought: you said ‘checks will go out.’ The other two I got by direct deposit, shouldn’t this one go the same way?
No. The IRS stopped sending direct stimulus deposits on March 24. You will either get your money on a Direct Express card (sort of a debit card) or by check.
This is what I saw too. I guess we’ll have to wait and see
I got my first check real fast and just wondered how the government is doing this.
It seems like they’re using a dartboard
“Engineers. Always changing something.”?
In my experience, the IRS site is pretty much useless. My first check came pretty quickly, but I didn’t receive my second check until 3 weeks after the IRS said it had been mailed.
I had never gotten my first two stimulus payments, and ended up claiming the $1800 tax credit when I filed my tax return (and got my refund payment on the 31st). Whenever I tried to check the status on the third payment I got the same message you did. Until Friday, when I was told my payment will be sent out on the 9th. It also said I would be getting a letter confirming this.
Fair enough. Mine gave me the exact date it would be deposited, and it was correct. It’s worth checking, since it takes virtually no time and is a reasonable first step. If it proves to be unhelpful, so be it.
I keep trying to find the status of my stimulus payment on the IRS site and it tells me my SSN was entered incorrectly. Even though I’ve had the same SSN for 50 years, I’ve checked with ssa.gov that all of my info is correct, and I put my SSN on my tax return. Besides the fact that I received both my $1200 and $600 payments.
Check your bank account online. My wife has a pending federal deposit coming this Wednesday which will make her a $fourteenhundredaire.
I just checked and see the latest (I assume the 3rd, $1400) stimulus payment will be deposited in my account April 7.
What’s strange is that I still haven’t received the 2nd payment of $600 (I did get the first $1200). I guess that one has something to do with filing federal tax returns? I never filed a FY 2019 return because I didn’t owe any tax and frankly my mind was on the pandemic.
But, I had filed FY 2018 and I e-filed for FY 2020 back in February or so. Apparently my 2020 return has still not gone through?? And once it does I’ll get the $600 as a tax return? (I wasn’t otherwise owed any return money).
Whassssup here?
also…
Surely it’s not a hyphen/no hyphen thing, right? Shirley?
The second stimulus specifically used your 2019 tax return information. If you didn’t file a 2019 return (yet), they don’t know if you’re eligible. Part of the reason why you might not have filed it yet by the end of 2020 was that it was really complicated and it took all year to get done (yes, we have a couple clients like that). This is especially true if the IRS has information on file about your income, so they know that you should have filed a tax return.
If you filed a 2020 return, you could have claimed whatever stimulus you didn’t already receive if you were eligible based on 2020’s numbers. It’s not automatic though - you have to actually claim it. Our software defaults to claiming it for everyone when the return is first created, but puts out a warning if you haven’t explicitly told it that nothing was receives - it just assumes that in calculating things until you put in whatever was received. I can’t say how your own software or whatever you used is set up. If you filled out paper forms and read the entirety of the line-by-line instructions, you would have encountered where to claim the refund, but if you assumed that it would happen automatically and filled out only the parts you were used to, then you’ll have to amend your return to get it (probably).
Ditto.
I didn’t type mine with hyphens.
No, I didn’t enter hyphens. Just the 9 number string like this: 000000000 (Obviously not my real SSN.)
Only data point I can add is that aged MIL has received each of the 3 stimulus payment quickly via direct deposit to the same account she gets her tax refunds and her monthly SS payments sent to. Has been utterly painless for her (which really means for me since I handle her affairs).
And yes, she has a tax return filed every year, which makes IRS’s job easier.
Just another bit of potential weirdness. My wife and I file jointly, so we were expecting $2800 total for the most recent stimulus. We got $1400, deposited on the date that the IRS site told us to expect our payment.
I was trying to figure out who to contact about this, when another $1400 was deposited, exactly one week later. So we got the full amount, but in two chunks. There’s all kinds of strangeness that can happen, apparently.