Every year around tax time people get grumpy about shelling out cash to support the government. It always depresses me when people want more and more services out of the government, but don’t connect these services with their high tax bills (I like to call these people “Canadians”). Luckily there’s an easy method to reduce your income tax bill to nothing.
If you thinking about buying tax preparation software then consider software programs such as TurboTax or TurboTax Canada (formerly QuickTax).
Before getting into the how, a consideration is should you do this. Taxes pay for communal services such as hospitals, roads and schools that people are quite happy to take advantage of (and often happy to pay for). In the movie “Stranger than Fiction” Will Farrell plays an IRS auditor who is investigating Maggie Gyllenhaal because she deducts the money that would have gone to the military from her tax payment. Unfortunately we don’t have à la carte taxation, you pay your share of EVERYTHING or you go to jail.
Tax protesters are kooks who mistakenly believe they’ve found a legal loop-hole to avoid paying taxes, withhold paying taxes, then get thrown in jail. I definitely don’t recommend anything along those lines. Wesley Snipes got himself into trouble by falling in with some of these characters. Luckily he’s half-vampire, so no one will mess with him in jail.
So, to get back to the title of this post, the easy way to pay no provincial or federal income taxes is just to earn less money than the minimum which is taxed in your country. In Canada, this would be about $9,850 (for someone living in Ontario according to Taxtips.ca), or $820 / month. Certainly you won’t be living like a king, but I think it’d be possible to live on this. You’ll have to calculate the maximum earnings for countries outside of Canada, but it’ll probably be a similar amount.
One man who’s living this lifestyle is Don Schrader. He felt strongly enough about not wanting to finance military conflict, that he has restricted his earning below an amount which would cause him to pay federal income tax (and lives the lifestyle this allows). He also drinks urine, so he might not be the ideal role model, but he does prove it’s possible.