Page 4 of the T1 General

Page 4 is where you work out whether you have paid just the right amount of tax, whether you will get a refund, or whether there is a balance owing,. If there is a balance owing, that means you owe money to the government. If the government owes you money because you have paid too much tax, you will get a refund.

Before you can fill out page 4, you have to go to Schedule 1 to work out your federal tax, and to form ON428 to work out your provincial tax. First though, let's review what you've learned.

You can look back over the previous pages if you aren't sure about the answers to the questions below. Answer the questions in complete sentences on a separate piece of paper.

1. What are the three income amounts you need to know before you can work out how much tax you have to pay?
2. What is the difference between a person's total income and his or her taxable income?
3. Once you have worked out what your total income is, what do you have to do to find out what your taxable income is?
4. Give three examples of money that might be included in someone's total income.
5. Give three examples of items that could be deducted, or taken away from, a person's total income to work out taxable income.
6. What is the difference between net income and taxable income? Are they always different? Always the same?

To see how much federal tax you will have to pay, you have to go to our simplified Schedule 1. However, before we do that, let's compare the real T1 General with our simplified version.

Comparing our simplified T1 General with the real T1 General

Set the two forms side by side, our simplified T1 General and CCRA's official T1 General. This will make it easy to compare the two forms.

As we mentioned earlier, page 1 of the T1 General is quite simple and straightforward. You have to fill in your personal details and mark whether you want this information to be passed to Elections Canada. You also have to show if you are applying for the GST credit or not. There are a few more details on the official form, but nothing too complicated.

Turn now to page 2 of our simplified form and compare it with page 2 of the official T1 General. This page has details of your total income. You have already listed and circled the numbers of any lines that you would have to fill in on our simplified form. Now circle the same line numbers on the official form. As we said earlier, you probably won't have to put anything on most of the lines.

Next, let's take a look at page 3 in both forms. This is where you report your net income and your taxable income. As you see, there are far more lines on the official T1 General than we gave you on our simplified version. Most of the lines on the official version won't interest you. The lines you are most likely to use are line 236 (your net income), line 250 (where you report social assistance payments from line 147), maybe line 255 (if you are a northern resident) and line 260, your taxable income. If you circled any of these lines on page 3 of the simplified T1 General, circle them again on the official one.

Before you can finish filling out your T1 General, you have to fill out Schedule 1. This is where you calculate your federal tax and your non-refundable tax credits. We will go through Schedule 1 in Activity 2 (c).