 All right, so married filing joint status. You can check the married filing jointly box at the top of the form, 1040 or 1040 SR, if any of the following apply. So obviously on the married side, you were married at the end of 2022, even if you didn't live with your spouse at the end of 2022. So from this standpoint, from taxes, we can think of marriage as kind of a leak, just simply a legal contract, right? So I mean, if you're getting married from a tax standpoint, now we're saying, okay, the marriage happened in 2022. Therefore, you would be, your assets would be thought of as kind of one for that year and your options would then be under the married category of married filing joint or married filing separate. So your spouse died in 2022 and you didn't remarry in 2022. Now, if your spouse died in 2022, this also comes into the category of top with a qualified widow and widower, you have the year of death. So in the year of death, you could still qualify as being married in that case. So notice it's a little bit wonky on the way that works because we said that when you get married, if you get married by December 31st, then we're gonna say that you were married for 2022. If a spouse dies anytime in 2022 and you were married, then it's not like you revert back because they died in 2022. We're gonna say, no, you were married. You're still married all the way through 2022. And from just the technical standpoint, you could see that obviously one of the spouses that passed away could still have income and whatnot that they would need to be reporting in the year of death, right? So you would think that obviously you would still have to be applying married filing joint would be generally what you would do in the year of death. And then after the year of death, that's when the question is as to whether you would go to single or to qualified widow, widower, or what do they call it now? Qualifying surviving spouse if there was like a dependent. So were you married at the end of 2022 and your spouse died in 2023 before filing a 2022 return? So that one, once again, you were married at the end of 2022. So that's basically the general rule. You were married at that end point and your spouse died in 2023 before filing a 2022 return. Well, they died in 2023. You were still married in 2022. So even though you didn't file the return because you filed by April 15th or 18th of 2023, you were still married in 2022. So that would be that. So a married couple filing jointly report their combined income and deduct their combined allowable expenses on one return. That's the point of the married filing joint return. You're kind of thinking of yourselves as one entity contracted together, the marriage being basically a contractual agreement when you're talking about it from a law standpoint tax law. And so you have the one return. So they can file a joint return even if only one had income or if they didn't live together all year. However, both persons must sign the return. So meaning it used to be that it was much more common that when people got married, you had a one income household like the other spouse was raising the children and whatnot, you had a one income household and then you had persons that were working at the same job for a long period of time. So it was a little bit more easy to think about what's gonna happen from a tax standpoint, going forward if the job is quite stable and you've got like a one income household and you're not going from job to job. Job, one job, my job. For example, these days that's not so much the case. It's quite common that we have the two people working at this point in time and people are moving from job to job, oftentimes instead of being in one job for their whole life or something like that. It's quite common for that to be more of the scenario. So you would think then in order not to disincentivize marriage, you would get kind of a benefit of getting married because usually that's gonna double things like the standard deduction because now we're gonna say the standard deduction's double and they should adjust the tax rates so that in the event that you have two people coming together that both are earning the equivalent amount of money, the same amount of money that you wouldn't have a tax disincentive. And that often leads to actually a tax benefit you would think for many couples because one of the spouses is likely gonna be working less if they're gonna raise a family and now you've got a doubling of the standard deduction and the tax rates have been adjusted on the, unfortunately on the low end, that's where funny stuff happens that way because that's where you got the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit of these refundable credits which could actually be reduced when getting married. So it's kind of weird the way it works out that marriage is kind of incentivized for middle and upper income you would think and it's actually kind of possibly the tax could possibly disincentivizing sometimes on the lower income due to the way some of these refundable tax credits kind of work. So we'll look at some examples of that in the future you can see what I'm talking about. So once you file a joint return you can't choose to file separate returns for that year after the due date of the return. So once you file the return as married filing joint you're kind of locked in for that year of married filing joint. So once you file a joint return you can't choose to file separate returns for that year after the due date of the return.