 and taxable to the recipient. This change does not affect agreements executed before January 1st, 2019, which means that for those earlier agreements, the old rules still apply. So alimony payments remain deductible by the payer and taxable to the recipient. So if you're dealing with a client or yourself where the agreement has been in place for some time now, then you're probably going to keep on going with what has happened in the past and not change the system. That's how the law was set up. But if it's a more recent agreement, or if there was a change to the divorce settlement agreements, in which case you want to you changed it to be under the consideration of the new laws, then then it's going to be different, right? Then you won't have to deal with the deduction or the inclusion generally is the idea. So it's crucial for individuals paying or receiving alimony to understand how these changes affect their tax situation. So for pre 2019 agreements, alimony paid should be entered on form 1040 schedule one with the recipient's social security number included to avoid penalties. So notice how this works. And this is a big problem when you have people that are separated, especially if they're not really communicating well and they've got lawyers that are just putting a wedge in between them and making it impossible to communicate so they can profit on their misery. What will happen then is that if you put something that doesn't mirror properly, the IRS is going to have an issue with it, right? So if one person, if the person that paid the alimony takes a deduction for it, they're going to have to rat out the other person by putting the other spouse's social security on the return and say that they got income in a similar way as giving a W2 or a 1099 kind of thing. And if the spouse who received the money doesn't include it in income, then you have this incongruity, which will likely trigger some kind of audit, which again will will will cause problems basically going forward. So the idea would be obviously we'd like to the divorce agreements and whatnot to be as clear as possible so that so that you don't get into to arguments with regards to the benefits and problems of taxes. And part of that is to mirror the kind of these payments. So recipients of alimony under these agreements must report the amount on their tax return, along with the date of the original divorce or separation agreement. So lines 19a 19b and 19c alimony paid. So let's just look at the line items line 19a. If you made a payment to or for your spouse or former spouse under a divorce or separation agreement entered into on or before December 31, 2018, you may be able to take this deduction. So you can't take a deduction for alimony payments. You made two or four spouse if you entered into your divorce or separation agreement after December 31, 2018, or if you entered into the agreement on or before December 31, 2018 and the agreement was changed after December 31, 2018 to expressly provide that the alimony received is not included in your former spouse's income. So make sure that you understand the new laws whenever making updates to any kind of divorce agreement or any kind of or going into any current kind of divorce agreement, but it should be easier because it's it's not on the taxes, right? So it should be an easier thing to do, hopefully. So line 19c on line 19c enter the month and year of your original divorce or separation agreement that relates to this deduction for alimony paid line 20. So now we have the IRA deduction. So if you made contributions to a traditional IRA for 2023, you may be able to take an IRA deduction, but you or your spouse of filing joint return must have had earned income to do so. So the IRA we've seen before the idea of a 401k plan and the idea of IRA as well in the terms of when you get the money out, when you're pulling the money out doesn't have to be included in income. So the general idea for these types of plans where you're going to get a benefit for using these tools by putting money