Tax Filing Season: How Filers Spend Refunds and Tax Refunds by Age Group: 2016 Google Consumer Survey
June 16,
2017 by HFBusiness Staff in General 
This is the third factoid in a series of four factoids detailing the growing emergence of a tax refund season. Many home furnishings advertising and sales events throughout the year focus either on a national holiday or “end of season” promotion. National holidays presumably give consumers an extra day to get out and shop and “end of season” events help retailers clear inventory off floors to make room for new merchandise. Only recently taking form across all consumer products is a sales event that focuses on when consumers actually have extra money to spend.
About 45 percent of last year’s tax refunds arrived in the month of February and an additional 22 percent were received in March. In the last two months of the first quarter of the year, consumers had $202 billion dollars of extra cash in their bank accounts.
In a study last year, GOBankingRates.com conducted a Google consumer survey asking consumers if they received a refund and if so, how they plan to spend it. Based on the survey, 70 percent of consumers expected to receive a refund. The majority plan to either pay off debts or put the refund into savings. Almost 13 percent want to use their extra money for a vacation and roughly 13 percent plan to either make a major purchase such as a car or home or splurge on smaller purchases.
Younger consumers are more likely to both receive refunds and also spend those refunds on consumer purchases as opposed to paying off debt or sticking in a savings account. For the key target groups for the Furniture Industry, 81.0 percent of older Millennials (25 to 34) and 73.3 percent of 35 to 44 year olds expect to receive a refund.
Source: GOBankingRates.com, 2016 Google Consumer Survey