 So you get you get kind of the idea there so so note if if you were married then you would think everything would kind of double when you're married but it's not right the cap only goes from 43 it phases completely out from 43 492 to 49 266 49 622 so you can imagine like for example if we were maxed out if we had two people maxed out at what did we say like 20,000 20,000 let's say that gets us to 3,733 3,733 if I said that was our starting point 20,000 income at 3,733 and then you got married let's say we got married first and we keep it keep everything else the same no other income involved so now we're going to go married filing joint and if I go back on over so now married filing joint now we still we just have the one individual here and we kept the income the same so obviously the standard deduction has doubled so that's good from a married perspective that does kind of what you what you kind of expect it to do and you've got the the child tax credit that plays in here but but now we're at still with the earned income credit is still at the 3,733 right so from the earned income level you still had 20,000 income with a married couple and it didn't really change that now that's a little bit deceiving because there's some interplay between the child tax credit and that stuff as well but you can imagine situations where people become kind of worse off from a earned income credit standpoint when they get married so for example if you had another the other spouse let's say earned revenue as well so let's say we had ww2 income at another 20,000 and now you're going to be pretty close to the threshold being over the threshold so now we've got a one qualifying child and if I go to here so now we're at the 1,534 because although although the tables are not exact here you get more of a benefit if married they're not like doubled you know so you can imagine a situation where you get married and you lose a substantial part of the earned income tax credit whereas if they were separate in this case the second spouse one spouse would have gotten the earned income credit and the other spouse would have been over the threshold at 20,000 to earn the income tax credit with no children you could have a situation where you have two people that both had a child let's say they were kind of even here they had 20,000 each and they both had one child so the earned income tax credit is 3,333 if they got married they would be jumping then from two people at this level to a married couple two people here and here to to now one couple that has two children and would now be on this side so let's just for the fun of it we'll get into that more next time with that two people but let's just add another dependent just for the fun of it so now we're in a situation if I go to page one we had married couple uh uh mr and mrs handerson two dependents now so they were single before now they got married the income is doubled to 40,000 so they were two individuals completely the same from a tax standpoint of 2020,000 each and one uh and one dependent the the standard deduction goes up substantially which is what you'd kind of expect because it doubled because now you might have doubled the income so now you've got the income but if I look at the just the earned income tax credit it's now at the 3,265 right if I look at that and before so before I would have had if I multiply this times two and I did this individually you'd have 40,000 of income and you would have two people filing head of household getting 3,733 both right so they would have they would have got an earned income tax credit of 7,466 and when they get married the earned income tax credit is 3,265 now that's not like a a perfect comparison because we can also basically look at the the the other things involved here the the child tax credit uh that's going to be involved we could just take a look at the bottom line and of course the standard deduction that got doubled so if this is at 5852 let's say 5852 and go back to the single situation and let's say we get rid of Jill and that sounded bad we got rid of her we're gonna get rid of her she's we're going we're reversing back to where we were before so and then we reverse back not to single but head of household head of household boom so now we're at head of household one and let's bring the income back down to 20,000 20,000 income all right i think i got everything right now so so then we're at the five two three three so five two three three so there's still you know a difference a difference involved and the difference could be substantial because you would have two people filing head of household versus the one married filing joint return so you end up with a substantial difference i did that quite quickly but the general idea is that you'd basically want to do some tax projections uh when getting married if you're in that kind of situation not so that it'll be a determining factor to get married or not but just to basically understand what the taxes will be so so it's not like a like a shock you probably want to do some projections there you know on the lower income side of things with these credits that are going to be involved these refundable credits in particular they they could possibly result in getting married having a tax detriment as opposed to a tax benefit which is often the case uh when when you're not dealing with these refundable credit situations oftentimes now i also just want to point out all the time that this you got to watch out for the scammers there because the scammers in order to maximize everything well we'll often try to use the schedule c right so if you had no income if your income was zero then it's like well you shouldn't you don't even need to file because you have you have no income right and so but uh if you had some income then you might be able to get the the earned income tax credit so you could say well what if we did the the schedule c income right and just also just to point out schedule c income is valid but you also have to be careful of people like scamming the schedule c income because trying to just generate some income that would then increase the earned income tax credit because that's something that you would think the irs would be uh and is you know skeptical on and looking you know possibly looking at so you might get an audit if you do that kind of thing but the schedule c is you know earned income subject to self-employment tax and then could impact of course the earned income tax credit whereas the passive income is not typically earned income thanks from interest and dividends so that wouldn't be included and if you have a lot of passive income then the whole you might lose the earned income tax credit because the idea would be that you got a lot of money in the bank or investments in order to generate that income and therefore don't need the earned income tax credit