Tax benefits

There are also ways to use your tax refund to invest and save you taxes down the road, says Mark Steber, chief tax officer at Jersey City-based Jackson Hewitt. “A big tax refund is a good thing if you do something wise with it,” he says. “Put a good portion of it into savings or investments.”

And if those investments purchased with your IRS refund provide future tax benefits, all the better, Steber adds. For example, if you know you are getting a sizable tax refund for the 2017 tax year that you plan on using to fund a traditional

IRA, you can report the amount of your IRA deposit on your 2017 tax form and then use the cash you get from your refund to actually fund the individual retirement anytime in 2018 before the tax filing deadline on April 17, 2018, Steber explains. Another benefit of putting money into an IRA is your money grows tax free.

Millennials, Steber adds, can also put some of their tax refund, which are dollars that have already been taxed, in a Roth IRA, a retirement savings vehicle that allows you to withdraw funds in retirement without paying any taxes on your gains.

“There are many tools in the tax code that will benefit your savings,” Steber says.

The bigger message for Millennials is to ignore all the noise about the stock market and investing and just get started, Rubicoin’s Savage says. “It’s about getting into the mind-set that the biggest risk you can take is

doing nothing.”