Beat the tax man.

If you got a tax refund this year, you blew a chance at free money.

Tax refunds are bad, bad, bad, bad, and bad.

I wish it hadn't taken me years to find this out, because I missed out on a whole lot of free money over the years.

First off, if you're getting a refund, you missed a chance to take the money that went to taxes and put it in an interest-bearing savings account during the year.

If you underpay your taxes a little in each paycheck, and put that money into savings, it earns money for you until you do your taxes in April of the next year. At that point, they let you know how much you need to pay, and you pull that much out of savings to pay it. In the mean time, it has been working hard in the bank to earn you free money.

You can even do better than that by putting some of it in a CD for several months, which has a couple of benefits. First off, it earns better interest than in the savings account, so you get even more money. Secondly, the money you put in a CD is money you can't easily touch, so it's harder to blow your savings when temptation comes around.

You can go to the IRS website and punch in a few numbers from your latest pay stub to find out how much money you should have withheld from the rest of your checks for the year to avoid paying too much (and almost everybody pays too much).

If you do this from a computer attached to a printer, you can even print out the results and take it to work, so your employer can make the change without you having to do any math or fill out forms.

There are a few other ways you can easily beat the tax man, some of which give you free money from your boss.

If your employer offers a 401K program, you should seriously consider signing up, especially if they offer a matching contribution.

What's a 401K, and what's a matching contribution?

A 401K is a way for you to save money for retirement, and every penny you contribute is money the tax man can't touch until you retire. This is good, because taxes reduce the amount that your money can work hard to make you the money you'll definitely want later.

A matching contribution is when your employer says, "If you'll put money in the 401K, we will put money in it for you, as well." This is exactly the same thing as your employer giving you a raise.

And remember the lesson on timing? The earlier you put even a tiny amount of money in a 401K, the longer it will have to earn money for you, so you won't be broke when you retire. And you seriously don't want to be broke when you retire.

But there's one more tax freebie you'll want to know about: an IRA, and specifically a Roth IRA.

The money you put into an IRA is after you pay your income taxes, and the government will never touch a penny of it ever again. Ever. Ever. It sits there earning you money for the rest of your life or until you take it out.

You can borrow money from either of these (but I'll spare you the details of all that for now), but their main purpose is to beat the tax man and make you a millionaire in time to retire.

No, really. The government actually wants you to be wealthy and has given you chances like this to do what you need to do.