 When we're looking at the filing status, you might think first by looking at it, it's just kind of an informational thing. It's at the top of the tax return. It's not dealing with any numbers, but it does of course have an impact and often a significant impact on the calculation. If we look at that in the form of the income tax formula, the first thing that should come to mind when you're changing the filing statuses would be the impact on the standard deduction if we're gonna be taking the standard deduction as opposed to itemizing. So we'll have different standard deductions based on married filing joint, single, head of household and so on. Also could have an impact on the tax. Collecting taxes. Trades, we also could have other impacts on phase outs and whatnot, but these are probably the main two things that will come to mind. We'll talk more in detail about the standard deduction in future presentations, but it is gonna be tied significantly to the filing status. If you look at the actual form 1040, this being a clip from page one of 1040 here, on the left hand side, you'll have this standard deduction given you kind of a brief scenario of the different standard deductions, which will be tied to the filing statuses, which are single or married filing separate, married filing joint or qualified surviving spouse, head of household and so on. So given that filing status, check only the filing status to the- Applies to you, the ones that will usually give you the lowest tax are listed last. So obviously when we're thinking about the filing statuses, you might want to kind of have them in your mind in terms of the most beneficial to the least beneficial. Usually I would categorize them in my mind to try to just kind of be able to recall them as easily as possible to run through different scenarios with individuals. I would think of them as the filing statuses that could be applied to people that are unmarried and the filing statuses that could be applied to people that are married. And then you've got some great area between the two in terms of when is someone married, if they're separated, are they're actually divorced for terms of the tax preparation? But generally on those two major categories, you can then think of the hierarchy of which would be best to worst filing statuses if you're not married, single typically being the worst and then head of household usually being better. And if you're a surviving spouse or something like widow or widower was the terminology we used to use before, that would be more of an unusual type of situation. But for taxes, it would be better than a single generally or head of household oftentimes, although in practice that would be a sad situation in life given the situation to qualify for qualified widow or widower. If you're married, married. Then you have the option of married filing joint. Oftentimes people think that I should be able to go back from married filing joint to single if I want to. I should have the choice to do that. But you don't typically because the idea of being married from a legal standpoint is that now you've kind of treated as one entity. So the idea would be that now you're gonna be taxed basically as one entity or you can choose to file married filing separate, which is not exactly the same thing as single. There's a big differences, a lot of big differences. So you might think that, well, I can just get married and if there's a negative tax implication which there can be sometimes, especially when dealing with some of the refundable tax credits, you might think, well, I could just file married filing separately and that'll be just like single but that's not necessarily the case. And so that's something to be aware of and to make clear both to yourself and to clients when thinking about marriage. The general idea, again, with marriage, you could debate it on different levels when we talk about married filing joint. Sometimes people get into the debates on different types of marriage and that kind of stuff. And you could think about in terms of what does marriage mean on a social level and what does marriage mean from a contractual kind of level in terms of the taxes. When we're talking about taxes, we're basically talking about a contractual type of agreement in essence where you had two individuals before which are in essence thought of as kind of one entity with regards to taxes with that kind of contractual agreement. So you can't just really go back to single unless you have been separated, for example, or divorced. Okay, so married filing separately, you've got the single status, head of household, married filing joint, and qualifying surviving spouse. So they changed the terminology, used to be qualified widow, widower before. Now they're saying it's a qualified surviving spouse. Okay, so tip, more than one filing status can apply to you, you can choose the one that will give you the lowest tax. So we'll go into some of the questionnaires in terms of a filing status. We'll talk about that a little bit more in depth later. Usually it's a pretty straightforward thing, meaning if you're single, obviously it is what it is, not much of a decision process there. Can you go from single to head of household? Well, that's gonna be dependent, possibly on a dependent as one of the conditions that might be able to pull you up. There's gray area there oftentimes because if you have a separation of people or if you have a child and a non-married couple, then the question is, well, who's gonna be able to claim the child? And if one person claims the child, it could up the filing status, but you might have a situation where the child has split custody, which is a common thing these days. And then the question is, well, then who would be able to claim the child and whatnot? So that's where the gray area comes into there. If you're in married filing joint, it's pretty straightforward situation if you're married, then you usually go married filing joint unless you wanna do married filing separate, which you might check the tax consequences of the two. Usually married filing joint is the better route from a total tax standpoint, but you might have other reasons to go married filing separate and you could check out if it's a better for total taxes.