Another reason to file separately is if you are a U.S. citizen living outside the U.S. and your spouse is a non-resident alien (non-U.S. citizen or green card holder). This keeps your foreign spouse out of the U.S. tax system.
Thanks for this! My long term partner and I were weary about getting married because of her 100k of student loan debt based on income repayments. It seems we'll be fine getting married as long as we just file separately.
@sov19871987 who wants to take on someone else's debt? Unless you are going to school to be a doctor or lawyer, $100,000 in student debt is extremely financially irresponsible.
Glad Saunders mentioned the Roth IRA. We are being told that we should file separately, but I want to be able to contribute to our Roth IRA without having to find loopholes. My retirement savings is more important than saving a few dollars now.
It’s very common to file tax separately. Marriage has got nothing do with Tax. It’s completely a different set of document with the respective city authority where the marriage had been registered. There are apparently no benefits filing jointly or separately. 1) More parties one brings out in one return, more difficult it becomes. 2) Filing separately also has other benefits, like one may heave a free-riding of the basics, without spending a single penny. 3) Tax return benefits ( if any ) can be assigned to a nominated person in your filing. This may not be the spouse. 4) Joint Retunes makes it easier to joint endeavours ( if any ), like mortgage payments ( if any ). The underlying rationale is simple; bigger income, lesser repayment instalments; provided both have excellent repayment records history.
My expouse filed single for 2022 and we were divorced in Jan of 2023. I didn't know and filed married filing separately and now I owe because I recieved a tax credit with health coverage. Can I ammend my taxes since we had already filed for the divorce in September of 2022. I have lived in another state since Feb of 2022.
Why even bother with the married filing jointly option? Why not streamline the tax code to remove it altogether and not have people try to guess or do two trial tax returns to see which way is better?