 so in that case you would think well if it's community property we should just split this thing down the middle and each of us spouses should get an allocation of an equal amount to our social security benefit thing that's what you would kind of think and so i'd say okay one way you might be able to do that is to assign it not to a taxpayer in the software we're going to say now it's it's joint by the way if i assigned it to the spouse then you'd have the same thing but in reverse so now you've got the same the same 1040 here the 100 000 flowing through everything is going to be the same except that on the schedule c it's now being applied to jane anderson instead of neo anderson and all the all the benefits are going to go to jane's social security number if you then say it's joint which you have to be careful to be able to make sure you can do depending on where you are located then we have the one schedule c here once again but it says up top now it's neo and jane anderson and then everything else is the same it flows through the to the 1040 it's all the same for income tax income tax evane next purposes but when i go to the schedule s e now i have two of them neo and jane so so now that nice and easily allows me to populate one schedule c while still being allowed to have two self-employment tax calculations which the total should still come to the same total but now for their particular benefits so that when they get their benefits it should be allocated to them separately and that could be a big deal when you're trying to kind of maximize your social security benefits that would be coming out at the end i got a different check mark here this is 14 14 130 if i go back on over here and i say it was for a single taxpayer it's 14 129 so it's pretty so obviously again this because it's a flat rate that we're using this one's coming out to be the same that's the total taxes it's just being allocated between the two and and it's a rounding difference that's why it turned red but it's still 14 130 so that looks good that's to be expected so that's one way that you can do that now if you're not able to do that then another thing you might be able to do is have a qualified joint venture or to have a partnership return right so if you and your spouse each materially participate as the only members of a jointly owned and operated business and you file a joint return for tax year you make a joint election to be treated as a qualified joint venture instead of a partnership for the tax year making this election will allow you to avoid the complexity of form 1065 but still give each spouse credit for social security earnings on which the retirement benefits are based so to do that you may be able to basically make two schedule sees allocating the proper amounts to each schedule see so for example to make this election you must divide all items of income gain loss deduction and credit attributable to the business between you and your spouse in accordance with your respective interest in the venture so if I was to go back on over and say notice that this one split at 5050 as we can see here now if you were trying to maximize your social security benefits or whatnot it might be more beneficial to have one or the other spouse allocated more of the income depending on their other information with regards to putting money into the social security and you can try to plan out what would be best best for social security but if the agreement was something other than 5050 then then you might you might be able to use the joint venture kind of system to allocate it differently to allocate the income differently or a partnership if you use a partnership you have to file a separate return and then you can use the allocation methods to allocate whatever the allocation agreement was whether it be 5050 6040 or whatever and then or you might be able to file in essence two schedule C's which might look something like this I would have to take this schedule C this is kind of tedious you'd have to say okay I'm going to say let's add another one and let's say the first this one is going to be for the spouse and the first one's going to be for the taxpayer and then I'm going to say this is going to be 120 let's say we'll take we'll take well let's just make it easy and make this a hundred thousand and and just to give an example so the whole hundred thousand and let's say that it's going to be 60 40 so let's say we're going to take that hundred thousand minus 40 thousand which will leave us 60 thousand and then on the second one it would be the same information information and I won't repopulate all the information but I'm going to say this is for the spouse and the bottom line is that this would be the hundred thousand and then I'm going to take minus 60 thousand of it which is going to leave us 40 so that comes up to the hundred thousand again right and then if I go back on over here now I've got a schedule C but now I've got two schedule C's one for one spouse at the 60 thousand the other for the the other spouse at 40 thousand and they're both allocated to the two spouses and that would total up to the the schedule the schedule s e then I have two schedule s e's which I tried to differentiate now to allocate based on whatever our our agreement is in a similar way that we might do in a partnership that might be different than just 50 50 which may not have a big impact or any impact possibly on the federal income taxes but could have an impact on the social security benefits that you would get right that's kind of the whole mess that has been created here that we are find ourselves dealing with so if I go into then page one then you still have the hundred thousand here and on page two we still have the same social security that has been calculated social security medicare the self-employment tax but now we have a different allocation based on based on the the two schedule C's so if you're going to make that election you want to you know do some more research on that and think about what your best option would be so if you're a married couple and you're in a community property state you might be able to do the easy thing one schedule C splitting everything down the middle which means that your allocations to the social security will be split down the middle or if you want to do more complex planning for the amounts you're going to get from social security benefits possibly because and you want to allocate that differently or for whatever reason or you have a partnership agreement that's different than 50 50 or you're not in a community property state you can think about maybe setting up a partnership flow through entity which allows you then to to have a breakout that's other than 50 50 if you so choose but you have to do another tax return and use this k ones that will then flow in here and then you can use the k ones to do the allocation which will then drive the social security the self-employment uh calculations or you might be able to do this method with basically two schedule C's possibly looking into a qualified joint venture situation which is tedious because then you have to basically populate two schedule C's in accordance with whatever allocation you're using and I and I've never actually done that because I'm in a community property state but that's a that's another option that you can basically drill down on and look into and see if that would be easier than say a partnership return in that situation