Tax ?: Married filing joint or separate???

[**eeyore**]

Does anyone have any good advice on when it might be beneficial to file taxes "married filing jointly" vs "married filing separately? I know I have read somewhere in the past which situations may benefit from one or the other, but unforutantely I can't remember which!

Thank you!

 

[Brendita]

It's simple for us.
If we file together.
Income is to large we have to pay.
We always file separt.
I claim our DS.
He claims the house.
We both get a refund.
It all depends on different things.

 

[salmoneous]

For the vast majority of married couples, their total tax will be less filing jointly. The primary expection is where the lower-paid spouse has expenses - such as medical expenses - they aren't being able to claim to due a 2% floor.

 

[Befferk]

We always do better by filing jointly vs separately. We both work full time and have one child. I use Taxact.com and it allows us to do a comparison before we file between joint vs separate.

Beth

 

[DVC Sadie]

We have always filed jointly but do have an accountant to do those taxes. Maybe you could talk to a certified accountant and they would be able to tell you if it would be benificial to file jointly or not.

 

[Cheshire Figment]

As a general rule it is advantageous to file a joint return.

Brendita's statement could be a tax law violation as the rule is if you are doing MFS and one itemizes the other must also itemize; if one itemizes and the other uses the standard deduction the IRS Master Computer can catch it and you will have to pay lots of additional tax plus interest.

That said, about the only time MFS beats MFJ is if one of the two, especially the one with the smaller income, has high unreibursed medical costs or employment related legal fees. One year Judy had about $16,000 in dental work done; we filed MFS that year as if we had filed MFJ the medical floor would have been about $6,000 higher. I did maneuver the real estate taxes, mortgage interest and contributions between us for the lowest total tax. Doing it this way saved us about $1,700 on our taxes. However in "normal" years due to our differences in income MFS would always have been higher.

Mike
CPA Retired

 

[**eeyore**]

Thanks everyone for your advice! It sounds like married filing joint is the way we should go. I'll try and run some numbers before we file just to make sure I'm not wrong.

Thanks again!