Avoiding common tax-filing mistakes

Today is a tax-season milestone. There's just one week left until your 1040 is due.

Yep, you've put off filing for 14 weeks. While you've been enjoying all this time tax-free, a major problem with delaying filing until the last minute is that when you do finally get around to filling out the paperwork, you might be in such a hurry that you make a costly mistake.

To help you avoid that, here are 10 common tax errors to be on the lookout for:

• Entering the wrong account in connection with direct deposit of your refund.
• Claiming the wrong hybrid credit.
• Not counting all your charitable contributions.
• Missing out on the PMI deduction.
• Overlooking  unearned income.
• Making math miscalculations. 
• Misentering or forgetting Social Security numbers.
• Ignoring IRS mailing material.
• Forgetting signatures.
• Missing the filing deadline.

Details on each of these errors can be found in this story I wrote for Bankrate.

Some other bloggers also offer their takes on common tax mistakes:

• Millionaire Money Habits lists five filing mess-ups.   
  
• SamaraK looks at some errors the IRS says it always sees.   
  
• ETL Technical Expertise has five more mistakes that show up on a lot of returns.

So even though time is short, slow down a bit so that you don't end up making one of these mistakes and costing yourself in the process.