My wife were recently married, this is our first full year as a married couple for taxes. When we did our taxes this year, we owe a pretty decent amount.
I have 1 selected for deductions and she has 0, when it’s my income, we are fine but when we add another income it goes south fast. If we take off mine and just run with hers we are fine, but add mine and we owe, we go from something like an 1800 return to owing 2200. After state we are creeping towards 4k owed. OUCH!
Are we being dinged for being married w/o children?
I don’t think so.
There used to be a marriage penalty before a few years ago. But, tax brackets and standard deductions have been adjusted to reduce the impact of the “marriage penalty”. The current standard deduction for married/filing joint is 2x the single standard deduction. Also the tax rates have been adjusted so that the income cut-offs for brackets to 2x single.
Not sure what you mean that you “have 1 selected for deductions and she has 0” ? Is this on your W-4 for withholding or what you enter into your tax software for exemptions ?
Are you saying that you owe 4000 more by being married rather than single ? Or are you saying that if you ignore your income you would owe 4000 less than if you include your income, but keeping everything else constant ? If so, are you still assuming that you are filing married or single.
I believe that you simply are not having enough taxes withheld from your paycheck. Look at your W-4 carefully. If you are a dual income family and each of you makes more than about 40K, when you fill out your W-4 look at the two-earner/multiple jobs worksheet. If you follow those instructions it will likely tell you that you need to claim 0, AND have additional money taken out of each paycheck.
