Vs having $1k sitting in a savings account in case I owe money at the end of the year, yeah it's not worth the $10 to worry about it.
It's a little different when you run a retail business. Before I started running it the place I work at made quarterly payments toward their tax bill. It essentially served the same purpose as withholding taxes on a paycheck. It softens the blow a bit when taxes come due in april. It doesn't take a genius to see that those first couple of payments could have been turned into considerably more money by the end of the year had they been held on to though.
Assume the payment would have been $1000. It was more than that, but this is simpler. We could either send that straight off to the government, or we could buy 10 of something that costs $100 each. A pretty standard retail markup would be to sell that item for $150. For the sake of simplicity assume that item sells out monthly. So in two months you've made another $1000 appear from money that you wouldn't even have if you'd sent it off to the government post haste. If you just left it like that all year, continually restocking and selling the same 10 items over and over again, you're already looking at thousands of dollars you've earned off the money you wouldn't have, but that's generally not how retail works. Most retailers would have been using the profits from every month to continually purchase greater quantities of the item to further compound their earnings by the end of the year. And just like that, $1000 becomes tens of thousands in a year's time.
Of course that's an idealized version of what really happens. I'm trying to look at the payment I didn't send to the government in a vacuum, separate from the rest of the business. Where that particular $1000 goes is hard to track in reality, as it just stays in the bank and gets spent on usual business stuff. I could just as easily say that was the $1000 that went to pay the electricity bill, which isn't something I can resell and show profit on, yet it still freed up $1000 somewhere else. The fact remains that, unless I screw up, it should have turned into
considerably more money by the time April 15th rolls around. At least that's the reasoning I use to justify my decision.
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