Tis the Season - Tax Time

There can beva marriage penalty, or their can be a marriage bonus. Earned income is taxed at different levels. A certain amount of income is tax free. In fact, people who make less than a certain level receive earned income credits to make up for their low wage job, and in fact can get back more in refunds than they pay in taxes. There is then an amount of income taxed at a lower rate. Income above that amount is taxedvat a higher rate, and then income above that is taxed at a higher rate still. So if someone who is getting an earned income credit marries someone earning a very high amount, they will lose their earned income credit, and some of the combined earnings are at the highest rate. That is the extreme. Orvtwo people paying at the lower rates, once their income is joined, some will be at the higher rate. However, for the person paying the higher rate, if they marry someone paying a lower rate, some of their income will get taxed at the lower rate, so there is a marriage bonus. It is different for every couple. Childless, single people making high incomes who are healthy pay the most taxes and receive the least services. Lower income people, especially if they are in poor health and have large families, pay the least but receive the most services. But our covenant with each other is that those who can and have help those who cannot and have not. We all benefit from an educated, literate population. We all need safe roads and bridges. We need police and fire personnel who are well trained and fairly compensated. To keep the most people healthy, we need to care for the sick who cannot afford care to prevent epidemics. We need to preserve our natural resources, both to keep our water and air clean but also to provide places of beauty and wonder to inspire and refresh us. We need a strong military to protect us internationally and to provide a capable workforce when disasters both man made and natural strike. Sadly, we need prisons to protect us from each other, a judicial system to provide some element of fairness. We need street lights and stop lights. How we divide up paying for these items does not always seem fair. But fair depends on where you are standing, and I think it is important to remember that even though we all hate seeing how many of our dollars are spent on taxes, that we receive benefits for them. SJ

Yea Aingeal, run it both ways on Federal and State.

Too many variables, unless someone is a tax expert, to say which is best. Kids, no kids. Can you itemize, or not. W-2's or self-employed. My mortgage interest used to be too low to itemize on Federal, but high enough to itemize on State. Does one spouse owe back taxes or back child support.

The list goes on.....

Make sure that you run numbers for both federal AND state for both Married filing Joint and Married filing separate (if your state has state taxes). When I was still working and doing taxes, many people would be close to the same either way on federal, but would get more back from the state doing MFS.