By Allison Martin, Bankrate.com

The tax-filing deadline is typically April 15 each year. If you can’t make that deadline, it’s easy to get a six-month extension for filing your return, though your tax payment is still due by April 15.

But what happens if you don’t file taxes by either of those deadlines? The consequences are very different depending on whether you’re expecting a tax refund or you owe the IRS money.

What happens if you don’t file and you don’t owe taxes?

If you don’t owe any taxes or if you’re owed a refund, there’s no penalty for not filing your tax return. But you won’t receive your refund until you do file.

There won’t be a penalty for filing late — just get your paperwork to the IRS so they can process your taxes and issue the refund. You have up to three years after the due date of your return to claim your tax refund.

Most Americans get a tax refund after filing their tax return. This happens because you’ve paid more in taxes over the year than you owe. Often, this is because most employers withhold money from each paycheck, which goes toward your taxes, but that withholding typically doesn’t account for tax credits and other tax benefits you may be eligible for, so the government has to pay you back in the form of a tax refund.

Every year, the IRS announces that hundreds of thousands of taxpayers are about to miss the deadline to claim their tax refund; the most recent announcement, in March 2024, said that $1 billion in unpaid refunds from 2021 was about to be relinquished by taxpayers.

If you didn’t file in the last few years, consider getting a tax return filed soon so you can get any money that’s owed to you.

What happens if you don’t file, and you owe taxes?

If you owe a tax bill and you haven’t filed your tax return, then the first step is to file your tax return, or a tax extension, as soon as you can, even if you can’t pay your bill just yet. You want to get your tax return filed because the failure to file penalty is much steeper than the failure to pay penalty.

Failure to file penalty

If you don’t file a tax return and you owe money to the IRS, you’ll face a failure to file penalty of 5% each month on any unpaid taxes, capped at 25%, plus interest. Here’s how it breaks down:

—First month: 5% of tax liability

—Second month: 5% of tax liability (after 60 days of being late, the minimum failure to file penalty is $485 or 100% of your tax liability, whichever is less)

—Third month: 5% of tax liability

—Fourth month: 5% of tax liability

—Fifth month: 5% of tax liability

There are some situations, including natural disasters and military service, for which the IRS will forgive failure to file penalties. But unless you fall under one of those exceptions, expect to pay the penalty.

State laws vary considerably, so check what your local laws are for failure to file. (Check your state’s income and sales tax rates.)

What happens if you pay taxes late?

Failing to pay your tax bill by the April 15 deadline also comes with a penalty and interest, though that penalty is lower than the failure to file penalty.

Failure to pay penalty

Each month that you fail to pay your taxes in full will result in the IRS assessing a penalty of 0.5% of your total tax liability. This will continue each month, maxing out at 25% of your total tax bill. (A six-month extension to file your tax return doesn’t apply to your payment. You don’t get more time to pay; you only get more time to file your return.)

There is also interest owed on any outstanding taxes. The interest will be determined by the current federal short-term interest rate plus an additional 3%. The short-term rate changes every three months, so your interest rate may go up or down depending on how long it takes to pay your tax bill in full.

For the first and second quarter of 2025, the interest rate for underpayment is 7% (see this IRS page for interest rate updates).

State laws vary considerably, so check what your local laws are for failure to pay.

What happens if you haven’t paid your taxes in years?

If you’ve avoided paying your taxes for a while, the IRS may seek to recover those funds from you in a number of ways, including garnishing wages from your paycheck, placing a lien on your home or other high-value property or coming directly for your bank account. The IRS will also withhold future tax refunds until your tax bill has been paid down.

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There are other potential penalties, as well. In some cases, if you owe more than $62,000 in taxes in 2024 (the dollar amount adjusts for inflation each year), the government may refuse to issue you a passport. The IRS may also choose to refer your outstanding tax payment to a private collections agency, which will likely be more aggressive in attempting to recover the funds. The IRS can seek to have people jailed for unpaid tax debt, but that’s highly unusual.

Generally, the IRS has 10 years to collect on unpaid taxes. However, there are exceptions to this, and situations where that 10-year period can get extended.

Steps to take if you’re behind on taxes

Dealing with outstanding tax debt can be stressful, and for some people it may feel easier to ignore the situation. But addressing the issue can save you anxiety and money in the long run. Here are two steps to get started:

—Determine how much you owe: Before you can start paying, you need to know just how much you owe the IRS. You can determine this by requesting your transcripts from the IRS. Even if you haven’t filed taxes in years, you will be able to see the information the IRS has on hand and see how much the agency says you owe.

—File your taxes: If you haven’t filed your taxes yet, do that. Contact your employers and ask for a copy of your tax documents. They should be able to provide these records. Upon filing, you may find that you are owed a refund. If you have a history of good tax compliance, it’s possible to get some of the fees abated under administrative penalty relief, but specific rules apply.

What to do if you can’t afford to pay taxes

If you can’t afford to pay your taxes, your best bet is to contact the IRS to work out a payment plan. The agency is more interested in collecting what it can than penalizing you, and is likely to work with you to set up a payment plan or an installment agreement.

If you can’t pay your tax debt in full, research the IRS’s resources for dealing with tax debt. You may qualify for an offer in compromise, which lets you pay less than you owe, or you might qualify to delay collection of your debt.

©2025 Bankrate.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writer

ATLANTA (AP) — A key vaccine advisory committee met for the first time under new U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading voice in the U.S. anti-vaccine movement.

Tuesday’s meeting was, to some extent, business as usual, though with a major question looming: Who would evaluate the committee’s recommendations?

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ two-day meeting took up vaccine policy questions that had been put on hold when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services abruptly postponed the panel’s February meeting.

“It will be striking” if the meeting is routine, given “signals and alarms” that suggest changes and perhaps reductions in federal vaccination efforts, said Jason Schwartz, a Yale University health policy researcher who studies government health agencies.

But Tuesday’s meeting started fairly routine, with most members joining through a webcast. They discussed an mpox vaccine and how the winter flu and COVID-19 seasons were going.

CDC official asks about COVID-19 vaccines

The conversation took a turn when a CDC official summarized a committee workgroup discussion about the waning COVID-19 pandemic, and asked whether the panel might consider changing vaccination recommendations. For example, instead of recommending seasonal shots for all Americans 6 months and older, should the recommendations be more focused — at least for certain age groups — on people with chronic illnesses or otherwise at higher risk?

“I guess I am surprised we’re considering a risk-based recommendation,” said committee member Dr. Denise Jamieson, dean of the University of Iowa’s medical school.

She worried it will be harder to implement, and may cause more headaches for patients who want to get shots and have them covered by insurance.

Dr. Jamie Loehr, a family medicine doctor in Itasca, New York, said he is in favor of a risk-based recommendation but also worried about feasibility and the message it would send.

“COVID is still a fairly dangerous disease and very very common,” he said. “We are not talking about 10 cases of mpox. We are talking about thousands of hospitalizations and deaths.”

A vote on the idea could come at the next committee meeting, scheduled for June.

Who will take up the committee’s recommendations?

The 15-member panel of outside scientific experts, created in 1964, makes recommendations to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC directors almost always approve those recommendations on how Food and Drug Administration-cleared vaccines should be used. The CDC’s final recommendations are not binding, but for decades they have been widely heeded by doctors and determine the scope and funding of vaccination programs.

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The committee was slated to vote Wednesday afternoon on whether to make new recommendations regarding three kinds of vaccines, including one for meningitis and another to prevent a mosquito-borne illness called chikungunya.

It’s not clear who would decide whether to accept those recommendations.

The Trump administration named Susan Monarez as acting CDC director in January, and last month picked her to lead the agency. But while she’s awaiting Senate confirmation, Monarez has essentially recused herself from regular director duties because of federal law around vacancies, said two CDC officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss agency matters and feared being fired.

That means any committee recommendations made Wednesday seems likely to fall to Kennedy. When an AP reporter asked an HHS spokesperson, he said he was looking into the question but did not immediately have an answer.

During his Senate confirmation hearings, Kennedy told lawmakers he is not “antivaccine.” But since taking office, he has promised to “investigate” children’s shots and to take a new look at the possibility of links between childhood vaccinations and autism — a theory that has been debunked by a number of studies, including at least a dozen that involved CDC researchers.

The panel’s chair, Dr. Helen Keipp Talbot of Vanderbilt University, said she didn’t know who would decide whether to sign off on any recommendations.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By Mia Taylor, TravelPulse

Most travelers can probably agree that going through airport security screening is an experience that falls somewhere on the fun meter between going to the dentist and paying taxes.

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To avoid this less-than-pleasant experience, some 20 million travelers have joined the TSA PreCheck program, according to the latest data from the Transportation Safety Administration.

The program, launched in 2013, promises “shorter wait times of under 10 minutes, greater checkpoint efficiency and improved security.”

However, newly released research from Upgraded Points, a travel and credit card points resource, reveals that despite the promised “under 10 minutes” wait time with TSA PreCheck, many program members experience substantially longer processing timelines.

Based on a survey of 1,517 Americans conducted this year, the research found that TSA PreCheck members are not necessarily speeding through security as the program promises.

More specifically, surveyed PreCheck members said that the average security screening processing time they experience is closer to 36 minutes. And that’s only 7 minutes faster than travelers who do not have PreCheck and reported an average processing time of 43 minutes.

Moreover, the research indicates that saving time is not necessarily the top attraction of TSA PreCheck membership in the eyes of harried travelers.

Instead, it may be the reduced stress associated with passing through security at the airport as a TSA PreCheck member.

The research shows that people with PreCheck say their airport stress levels are cut in half by their membership. These same travelers rate their stress when going through traditional security lines at a 7.4 on a stress scale of 1 to 10. However, the stress levels of surveyed travelers drops to just 3.5 out of 10 when in a TSA PreCheck screening line.

Additionally, when asked which TSA PreCheck member benefits are most important, 38.7% of travelers said the reduction in stress associated with airport screenings was the number one benefit.

Having access to shorter airport screening lines, meanwhile, came in second, with 34.4% of surveyed travelers saying it was the most crucial benefit of TSA PreCheck membership.

“Even if PreCheck isn’t saving a ton of time, travelers still like the peace of mind that comes with it,” Kyle Beierlein, the researcher for Upgraded Points who spearheaded the study, told TravelPulse. “I think it makes people feel like they’re doing everything they can to make getting through security easier.”

Underscoring that point, 94% of PreCheck holders who participated in the Upgraded Points survey said their membership improves the overall airport experience, and 92% percent said the $78 cost of membership is well worth the service.

“Plus, there are real perks like not having to take stuff out of your bag, being able to bring your young children through with you, and not stripping down to bare feet and short sleeves. That definitely helps cut down on stress,” Beierlein continued.

Indeed, about 11.5% of travelers said the ability to keep their shoes on during the airport screening process was the most important value of TSA PreCheck membership, followed by 11.1% who said not having to remove laptops or liquids from carry-on luggage is the top benefit.

Ironically, going through airport security screening without TSA PreCheck is far more stressful for those with the membership. When asked to rate how stressful it is going through airport security without TSA PreCheck (again on a scale of 1 to 10), TSA PreCheck members rated the process a 7.3. However, travelers who are not members of TSA PreCheck said the process of going through security only rates as 5.5 out of 10 on the stress scale.

Time spent at airports: TSA PreCheck vs. nonmembership

Circling back to how TSA PreCheck membership impacts a traveler’s overall time spent at the airport, the research provides a few more data points.

For instance, the researchers found that TSA PreCheck travelers typically arrive at the airport about one hour and 41 minutes before a flight, while those who do not have PreCheck membership generally arrive at the airport one hour and 47 minutes before their scheduled departure.

In other words, having TSA PreCheck membership only shaves about 6 minutes off the amount of time travelers feel they need at the airport before a flight.

And, of course, there’s the initial data point about TSA PreCheck membership only reducing airport screening time by about 7 minutes on average.

There’s likely a variety of factors at play regarding the variance between what TSA promises for PreCheck members (less than 10 minutes to pass through screening) and what many travelers are actually experiencing, Beierlein says.

“First, TSA PreCheck is available at over 200 airports, so smaller, less busy airports are likely bringing the average down,” Beierlein told TravelPulse.

“But most travelers are going through larger hubs, where wait times would typically be longer,” he added.

What’s more, the number of people who have TSA PreCheck membership is increasing, and as a result, the program’s expedited screening lines are becoming less exclusive, added Beierlein.

There may be another variable at play as well, admitted Beierlein: Both TSA and the travelers who were surveyed for the Upgraded Points research are merely estimating.

“TSA hasn’t said exactly how they calculate their times, and our travelers are going off memory, so there’s room for some fluctuations on both sides,” he explained. “That said, people are pretty clear: they don’t typically get through in under 10 minutes. It usually at least feels about triple that.”

It’s also important to remember that the figure in the survey is merely an average. Some travelers said PreCheck saves them a lot of time, while others said it still takes over an hour to get through screening.

“Overall, the reality is probably somewhere in the middle: at smaller airports, it might still be under 10 minutes, but at bigger ones, especially during busy times, it’s often 30 minutes or more,” said Beierlein.

©2025 Northstar Travel Media, LLC. Visit at travelpulse.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By LEANNE ITALIE

NEW YORK (AP) — Robbie Randolph is a real estate agent and interior designer for the rich, yet even he’s not immune from the anxiety of “house shame.”

That’s the judged, bullied, defeated feeling you can get when Pinterest-perfect syndrome takes over, either in our own minds thanks to social media or fed by the side eye of a friend with impeccable digs.

House shame can make you reluctant to invite people over, and in some cases lead to isolation and despair.

“House shaming is actually how designers kind of get business,” Randolph said. “A client will go over to another home that’s professionally designed and they’ll be like, ‘Oh my gosh, my house isn’t that nice.’ They then seek out an interior designer.”

Randolph, in Greenville, South Carolina, said interior designers themselves are just as vulnerable. So are exhausted parents with young children, people who just don’t love to clean, those who can’t afford home updates, or folks who really have a lot of books and/or love collectibles.

“I’ll do an Instagram post of an amazing, immaculately decorated house and I go, ‘Wow, my house stinks,’” said Randolph. “And everyone walks into my home and tells me how amazing it is. At the end of the day, I’m still human and I still get trapped by the devil of comparison.”

Remembering one’s humanity in a world where true perfection is elusive goes a long way, he and other experts noted.

The scary side of house shame

Not wanting to entertain at home can simply mean spending time together elsewhere, in restaurants, at the theater or in the homes of others, for instance. But it can also bring on hoarding or other traumatizing behaviors like losing the will to clean.

“I have a friend who refuses to have people over because she’s so ashamed of her house,” Randolph said.

His friend didn’t have the money or the will to fix up the house after her abusive husband moved out.

“I think house shaming is about comparison, but it can also be about a person’s own struggles,” he said.

Speaking of Martha Stewart …

Barbara Fight was a TV producer for Martha Stewart for 12 years before going into home organizing in New York. She said house shame got way worse with the rise of social media and its idealized depictions of homes most people can’t afford or otherwise will never have.

But there are lots of easy, inexpensive ways people can help themselves feel better about their living spaces if they so choose.

The issue is often just too much stuff. She sees a lot of homes with row upon overlapping row of framed photos in ancient (not in a good way) frames. She suggests paring them down to the bare minimum and stashing the rest in a decorative box that can be pulled out for perusal.

A cluttered living room appears in New York on Tuesday, April 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Leanne Italie)

Like Randolph, Fight has seen it all: People overloaded with things they’ve inherited from dead relatives. A young woman who wouldn’t bring her fiancé to her parents’ house, “because it’s such a mess.”

Fight suggests: “Take away a third of what’s out.” One client, she said, “had this long, narrow, beautiful table in her living room just filled with stuff. It was the first thing you saw when you walked in. I said to her, ‘It’s going to take me 15 minutes to make this look Instagram-worthy.’ About five pieces stayed on there. About 10 things were thrown out, and we found a different place for the rest.”

Does changing your home feel overwhelming?

Jamila Musayeva is the author of “The Art of Entertaining at Home” and hosts a lifestyle YouTube channel with over 1 million subscribers. She’s also an etiquette coach.

“A home doesn’t have to be perfect to be welcoming,” she said. “It simply has to feel cared for. If you’re worried about how your space might be perceived, start by focusing on what you can control.”

That could mean freshening up an entrance with a lit candle and a small flower arrangement to shift the mood for guests.

This image released by Jane’s Addiction Organization shows an organized shelf unit in a formerly cluttered living room in New York on Oct. 10, 2023. (Jane’s Addiction Organization via AP)

“Think ahead about the rooms your guests will actually see. Give those areas some attention rather than overwhelming yourself with the whole house. A clean bathroom with a fresh hand towel, good lighting in the living room and somewhere cozy to sit go much further than expensive décor,” Musayeva said.

Where the memories are made

Wendy Trunz, co-owner of the Long Island home organizing company Jane’s Addiction Organization, said she grew up in the smallest house in her family’s circle of friends and family. Now, with a husband and two kids, she lives in the smallest house among her neighbors and loved ones.

“My mom’s door was always open. Their table always had an extra seat. You just knocked and came in, and my mom just believed the more the merrier, this is where the memories are made and don’t mind the mess. And there’s something great about that,” she said.

Trunz notes that along with social media, the COVID pandemic contributed to house shame by sending millions of people home.

“Even now, five years later, we’re going in and people are still not eating at their dining room tables and not having people over,” she said. “Their husband is still sitting there working and it’s covered with stuff. We come in and clear that table and they call us in tears because for the first time they ate as a family around their dining room table again and not at the counter. It’s amazing. It’s amazing.”

Trunz had a easy solution for a client who had a stuffed front hall closet and felt she couldn’t accommodate the coats of guests.

“We just bought them a rolling rack, as if it’s a fancy thing. Nobody’s going to open the closet,” she said.

And if someone does house-shame you, there’s another easy solution, she said. One of her best friends is a teacher who invited teacher friends over for a meal and made her favorite tuna fish, choosing to focus on the magic of gathering rather than the toil of preparation.

“And one person in the group kept pointing out the fact that she only had one bathroom, and how did she live like that. I asked my friend, ‘What are you going to do about that?’ And she said, ‘You just decide not to have that person over.’ It can be that simple.”

Grant Magdanz, who uses Instagram to chronicle Los Angeles life living with his grandmother, has racked up about half a million likes for a video he posted last September showing off their decades-old furniture, mismatched cups and cluttered dining table.

“Not everyone’s life is themed, curated and made for social media,” a scroll on the video said. “In fact, most people’s aren’t. And we’re happy all the same.”