Is it really that difficult to put away 30-40% of every payment towards taxes? Not trying to be cynical, just having a difficult time understanding why a service is needed to perform a routine transfer.
Yep - this is pretty tough for the majority of independent contractors. Simply figuring out how much to save is the first issue, but the larger issue is ACTUALLY separating funds from your regular checking account so you don't spend these funds that should go to the IRS every quarter. We built Painless to automate what (admittedly) should be a "routine transfer" but often isn't and becomes a problem at the end of the year when we owe a huge bill that sucks to pay outright. The convenience of automating money movement is the big piece of what we do for our users. Hope that helps!
There's a lot of value in being able to hone in on the exact figure -- 31.8% based on your previous year's income and deductions -- giving you an extra 9.2% if you were conservative and putting aside 40%. I don't know if that's what this service can actually offer, just putting out there that it's more complicated than just setting aside a gross estimate like that.
Totally right - We withhold exactly the amount you need to set aside, as opposed to just blindly ballparking it as we've all done at some point (if we separated taxes at all). Taking the guesswork out of the amount we should be setting aside is a big piece of why we built Painless!