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Long term lurker on hacker news. My wife and I got married last year and this will be our first time filing our taxes jointly. At the beginning of the year, we
by etalam 11y ago
Long term lurker on hacker news. My wife and I got married last year and this will be our first time filing our taxes jointly. At the beginning of the year, we naively changed our W-2 withholdings to married and ended up with a massive tax bill at the end of the year. Little did we know, choosing married on your W-2 results in less taxes being withheld because it assumes that you're a single income family, whereas in reality our taxes actually went up. Seeing this number triggered me to dig a little deeper into the tax code and saw how unfair this was. How many of you guys are dual-career couples who were impacted by this quirk as well?
- skewart 11y agoHah! The exact same thing happened to me.
- laurencerowe 11y agoI believe you can still file separately, though the mortgage interest deduction is limited to 500K of loans per person instead of 1M.
- etalam 11y agoYou can still file separately, but the brackets for singles and married filing separately are different. The brackets for married filing separate is effectively the brackets for married filing jointly except split in half. At lower levels it's the same, but once you get to the higher ends of the 25% and beyond they start to diverge: http://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/tax-brackets.aspx http://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/tax-brackets.aspx