 internal revenue service IRS tax news wedding planning checklist cake rings flowers tax forms everyone knows the decision to get married starts with tax planning IRS tax tip 2022-77 may 18th 2022 the summer wedding season is fast approaching wedding planning is often overwhelming but figuring out how marriage will affect a couple's tax situation doesn't have to be here are a few things couples should think about as they prepare for the big day name and address changes so people who change their name after marriage should report it to the Social Security Administration as soon as possible you got to tell the government who you are what your Social Security number is and so on and so forth otherwise they get confused and if the IRS is confused it's just nothing problems they need to know who you are and where you live so that the name on a person's tax return must match what is on file at the SSA so that's one way that they're gonna do some kind of verification process of course they're trying to tie out the name the Social Security number the address and so on and again if you don't do that you might find some problems filing the tax return so in for example if you try to file electronically it might kick it back meaning the tax return doesn't go through doesn't get processed because there's not the same name and Social Security number so if it doesn't it could delay any tax refund to update information taxpayers should file form SS5 application for a Social Security card it is available on ssa.gov ssa.gov by calling 800-772-1213-800-7221-213 or at a local SSA office Social Security administration that is if marriage means a change of address the IRS and US Postal Service need to know so obviously if you're changing the address got to tell the people that deliver the mail to take the mail to where you are not where you used to be so to do that people should send the IRS form 8-822 change of address there's a link to that form here if you want to check it out and use it if applicable taxpayers should also notify the Postal Service to forward their mail by going online at usps.com so you can get the mail forwarded there or their local post office you can actually drop in these days I think they won't kick you out for COVID things or anything at this point you can talk to people and everything and they can set things up for you possibly so double check the withholdings you got to take a look at your withholdings make sure that you're paying the IRS what you're supposed to pay with the withholdings after the tax situation because that changes stuff up it's a big change for taxes you got to make sure that you have things lined up on the tax situation so after getting married couples should consider changing their withholdings so nearly newly married couples must give their employers a new dub form W-4 employees withholding allowance within 10 days in other words your withholdings can't change depending on your marital status and the income possibly of your spouse so therefore your prior W-4 that calculated your withholdings are probably not adequate at that point in time so you probably want to use the online estimator tool to try to estimate what your withholdings will be because you don't have the ability to kind of rely on the prior year tax return to give you an idea as to whether you're in the ballpark in the range to have the proper withholdings because the marriage will make it so your next year's tax return is totally different so you're gonna want to basically do some kind of estimate to try to figure out if your withholdings are appropriate and then fill out the W-4 form remembering that your actual employers probably not going to give you any tax advice and if you ask them for tax advice they might be kind of rude they might just say I can't do that because we don't want to get sued so we just gonna give you the W-4 and then you got to do your research fill out the W-4 and give it back to the human resources at the employer and then you go from there so if both spouses work they may move into a higher tax bracket or be affected by the additional Medicare tax there's a link to that here they can use the tax withholding estimator tool so it's pretty good tool this estimator tool there's a link to it you basically need tax software to kind of figure this stuff out at this point for multiple reasons one the tax code has been changing from year to year and two the change from single to married is a significant you know change so you're gonna want actual tax software they can kind of project out into the future and the tax withholding estimator is getting more and more to be that kind of tool it's pretty good so you want to make sure to use something like that to get your withholdings right it's on irs.gov of course irs.gov to help complete a new form W-4 taxpayers should review publication 505 tax withholding and estimated tax there's a link to that here for more information filing status married people can choose to file their federal income taxes jointly or separately each year so when you think about the filing statuses I would generally put them into two categories you've got the single category statuses and then the married category statuses if you're in the married categories then you can't go back to the single you can't say well I'm married now I have the option you might think it might seem logical to say well if I'm married I should be able to file married or single if I want to but no that's not what you get to do you could file married filing joint or married filing separate married filing separate she might say well yeah but that's the same thing as filing single but it's not it's not the same thing because you could lose a lot of the credits and stuff they put a lot of restrictions for married filing separate so just note that you probably want to file married filing joint when married just from a tax standpoint that you're usually better off that way you have the option of filing married filing separate but don't think that that's the same thing as filing single especially when you get to some of these credits like the first fundable credits like the earned income tax credit and so on so and if you're if you're single obviously then you've got the single you might have had a head of household filing statuses of the most common there so for most couples filing jointly makes the most sense but each couple should review their own situation if a couple is married as of December 31st the law says they're married for the whole year for tax purposes so you can plan your wedding accordingly of course remember marriage is just a tax planning event of course so when like if you if you get married and on December 31st then even though you weren't married for most of the year you were married by the end of the year that's the cutoff date so the whole year you would be declared kind of married and if you married on January of the following year that would be in the following year so plan accordingly with that information so more more information down below we got topic 157 change your address how to notify the irs there's a link to that there's a link to all this other stuff that we said there was a link to and there'll be a link to this in the description