 Here we are in our Form 1040. We're using LASERT tax software to populate it. You don't need tax software to follow along, but if you have access to tax software, it's a great tool to run scenarios with. You can also get access to the Form 1040 related schedules, related forms at the IRS website, irs.gov, irs.gov. We're focused in this time on the filing status, which is right up top on the Form 1040, where we have the single filer, the married filing joint, married filing, separate MFS, head of household, HOH, qualifying surviving spouse, QSS. So we'll go through some scenarios on some of these items. Down below, we've got our filer starting off the single filer, Mr. Anderson address down below. No dependence at this point in time. The income, we're just going to stick at the 100,000 W2 income for our generic start point. And then down below, we're just going to have the standard deduction, the $12,950 get-ness to the taxable income of $87,050. Now, the impact of changing the filing status on the actual tax equation will mainly be here in the standard deduction. So notice this is kind of linked to the calculation of the standard deduction. We're going to talk about the standard deduction in a future presentation. So we'll dig into that a little bit more in the future. And then it has an impact on the actual tax calculations because we have a progressive tax system. And you would expect there would be different tables depending on the filing status most easily seen. If you're going from a single filer to a married filing joint, then you would think that the income levels will be like doubled or possibly could be. And therefore, you'd have to kind of adjust your progressive tax tables to kind of fix that whole system. So let's go back to the first tab and focus mainly up top on the status. So the single status, and this is my thought process with the statuses, usually would be your first thought is someone either married or not married, right? And if they're not married, then the options that they have available to them would either be single. That would be the worst option for the purposes of tax filing, at least. And then if they could step up, they would step up to the head of household, which could give you added benefit in terms of the standard deduction and possibly the tax tables, but you can only do that if normally you had a qualifying dependent in the mix. If you're married and then you could have a step up from there to the qualifying surviving spouse, but that would be a rare situation where you had a married couple. Hopefully it's a rare situation. And one of them passed away and then you'd be looking at whether or not they qualify for the surviving spouse. If they're married, then they can't jump back to single or head of household unless considered separated or divorced, but rather have to then choose the married filing joint, which is the normal option most people will be choosing. When married, it's usually gonna come out to be most beneficial or married filing separately, which might be chosen under some scenarios, possibly in a situation where one spouse is thinking the other spouse isn't being honest with their taxes or something and maybe they wanna separate for that reason, or they just wanna separate their returns, or maybe in some cases it would come out better tax-wise in total to file married filing separately, but that's fairly rare of a situation on that third one. Note that you could again have different scenarios in terms of the community property states versus non-community property states in terms of how you would handle married filing separately. So you gotta make sure that you understand what the situation would be if someone wants to file in that area. But usually, people would be married filing joint when married. So notice here, we got a single filer and they're not married, so they're locked into the single file or nothing else they can really do. They're on the worst filing status because there's nothing that's gonna pull them up from that status because they're not married and they don't have any dependence. So then, now if they had a qualifying dependent, which would usually be down here, they might be able to move up to the head of household. So let's add a dependency what that would look like. So now we've moved the status from single over to the head of household and everything else is the same up top for the taxpayer and we don't have a spouse situation, but now we have a situation where we have the dependent down here, which is normally what you would kind of expect to see. So if you're thinking about talking to a taxpayer and you're like, okay, what's the filing status? If they're single, if they're not married, then the question would be are there dependence? If there are dependence, then it's possible, quite likely possibly that they can move up from the single to the head of household. Now note this is often where there's kind of confusion or gray area if there's split custody in a child type of situation where you have two parents that have some kind of split custody situation because note that we can normally only have a dependent being claimed in one area. So basically from a tax standpoint, the IRS doesn't wanna have two people getting the benefit of the one child and the benefits that could be gotten from a child from a tax standpoint is if they're a single filer, they can move up the status to head of household, which would have a benefit possibly on the standard deduction if they're taking the standard as opposed to the itemized deduction and possibly to the taxes on the tax calculations from the calculations there as well. There could also be changes to thresholds in terms of income thresholds possibly with relations to credits and deductions. Now note if there's multiple children that are involved, then there's not gonna be any added benefit from the standpoint of filing status. So if someone was single and they had like one dependent, then that would be possibly enough to push them up depending on the circumstances from single to head of household. If there's another dependent involved, then you might get a benefit from the dependent because the dependent has other tax benefits such as possibly a credit, this one being qualified for the child tax credit which we'll get into later. So there's other things involved but right now we're just focusing in on the movement from a single to head of household. So that usually involves one qualifying usually dependent. In some cases you might have a situation where they don't actually have to be a dependent. So if they're in a situation where they don't, where they aren't actually your dependent and that's because of like those kind of unusual scenarios.