The 8 dumbest last-minute tax mistakes people make

Reuters / Alessandro Garofalo

If you mess up your taxes, you could be in store for a real headache.

Thanks to calendar quirks, taxpayers have four extra days to file in 2017.

That doesn't mean you should wait till the end to get started. Rushing through most anything lends itself to silly, last-minute errors, and taxes are no exception.

"It's like homework," says financial planner Keith Klein of Turning Pointe Wealth Management in Phoenix, Arizona. "You can only do so much, so long, and then you get distracted."

If you're scrambling to get your taxes together at the last minute, it's easy to slip up and enter a wrong number, which can lead to even more paperwork in the form of a tax amendment or paying additional fees to the IRS.

"Often times people in a hurry are already under pressure and stress, so they aren't thinking clearly outside the moment that it's due," Brian Ashcraft, director of compliance at Liberty Tax in Virginia Beach, told Business Insider.

Below, Klein and Ashcraft share some of the dumb, last-minute filing mistakes you'll want to avoid.