 Most of this information can be found at the Form 1040 Instructions Tax Year 2022 Instructions for Schedule 1 Additional Income and Adjustments to Income, the Adjustments to Income section which you can find on the IRS website, irs.gov, irs.gov, looking at our income tax formula we're focused once again on the adjustments to income remember in the first half of the formula is in essence an income statement where we have income minus the equivalent of the expenses those being deductions gets us to the equivalent of net income that being taxable income our goal it's flipped on its head we want taxable income as low as possible as opposed to normally when we want net income as high as possible we call this second item adjustments to income you might hear them call above the line deductions or schedule one deductions you could think of them as deductions or contra income accounts because they're going to be decreasing the income line to get down to that key number the AGI the adjusted gross income the number often used to calculate phaseouts on things like deductions and credits as income levels rise also note that we don't have that same kind of hurdle with the adjustments to income as we do with the itemized deductions that we would have to clear before they benefit us so if we qualify for an adjustment to income above the line deduction that could be a good thing that we can take even if we don't clear the hurdle of the standard deduction down here on line number 10 adjustments to income from schedule one here is the schedule one we're looking at the student loan interest deduction now this one obviously is a fairly straightforward type of deduction if you have student loans that are qualified student loans you should we receive documentation related to the interest portion of the payments that you may be able to deduct and it might be dependent upon whether you can deduct it or not the amount of your AGI you could have like income limitations as your income level goes up it's also an interesting topic with regards to personal debt personal finance and government policy questions you often get asked when doing tax preparation so I'll just give a few thoughts on them note that when people get into debt issues one of the strategies is often to try to consolidate the debt trying to take the debt out of the areas where you have the high interest payments often credit cards and put them in an area where hopefully you have lower interest payments possibly using something as collateral to support the loan like a home or a car or something like that and that may be able to facilitate say lower interest payments lower rent on the purchasing power of the money in essence and also give you some standardization over time instead of having these fluctuation of interest payments that you might have with say a credit card which can give you a little bit more peace of mind to think about what your strategy is going forward now note when you think about student loans with regards to that policy gets a little bit confusing because one the interest payments are usually fairly reasonable they're not bouncing all over the place like with a credit card for example but even if you can get a lower interest payment if you were able to pay off the student debt and consolidate the debt somewhere else some would argue that that wouldn't be a good strategy because one you get the deduction and the deduction here could be a beneficial item but then you've got to figure in and calculate how much actual benefit you're getting from the deduction because of course this deduction is just a reduction of net income you're not actually getting a dollar for dollar interest back of the 2000 it depends on your actual tax rate so that's one issue the other thing that often comes up is people say well the government's at some point in time is just going to wipe out all student debt which they are threatening to do and say they could possibly actually do that which is an interesting scenario just from a policy perspective because you can see you could see people's behavior when when you say you're gonna take out debt and then we're just gonna we're gonna say that we're not gonna we're gonna wipe out the debt at some future time obviously that will incentivize people to take on take on more debt which they don't expect to actually pay off so that's an interesting so that might actually be true I wouldn't really depend on that to happen and I and I and I think it's actually bad incentive wise for the for the health long-term health of the economy because because it obviously will incentivize behavior of people taking on more debt than they otherwise would or could handle with the expectation that they're just not gonna end end up having to pay it off and that's not a good strategy to be learning usually although again it could pay off given given given the current situation so that's just the dynamics of that which are kind of interesting so any case line 21 student loan interest deduction you can take this deduction only if all of the following apply you paid interest in 2022 on a qualified student loan defined later so typically you'll get documentation if it's a qualified student loan but standard student loans you got a loan a general loan for higher education would be the general idea or the general case your filing status is any status except married filing separately once again if you're married you and you decide that you want to file separately you can't go back to head a household or single you got a file married filing separately and the iris is quite skeptical of people doing that to try to take advantage of certain areas on the tax code such as deducting interest for example because if you file married filing separately possibly you would be able to take the deduction because of the income threshold isn't there so anything that has a phase out of income thresholds the iris is gonna be skeptical of people separating their married returns to file separate to take advantage of you know income thresholds possibly so that's another example that married modified adjusted gross income a GI is less than 85,000 if single head of household or qualified surviving spouse or 175,000 if married filing jointly use lines two through four of the worksheet in these instructions to figure your modified AGI so that kind of makes sense to me obviously that you know that you would think that it would phase the the amount of deduction you would get with phase out because your loan paid off obviously if you're making over 85,000 if you went to school and you took a loan to get the education and then you're now you're making 85,000 or 175 which is another interesting topic because when they talk about wiping out the student loans