Enjoying the IRS

The federal government is a traditional institution that stands on its values. Sometimes, it has to recognize changing time. In order to accomplish this amazing feat, they have given the Internal Revenue Service the responsibility of keeping up with your personal life by creating and updating filing statuses!

There are five filing statuses, although one of them has two categories. What you need to know is quite simple.

Unmarried people belong to status 1: single, unless they have one or more dependent children.

Unmarried people with dependent children are 4: head of household, unless they were recently widowed.

Unmarried people with a child dependent who were widowed sometime in the last three years are 5: qualifying widow or widower. Not all widows and widowers are qualified. A child dependant must be inherited.

There you have it. Unmarried people can be single, head of household or qualifying widow(er) but not all three, or even two of them. They have to choose one.

Married people are married filing jointly and are a 2 or married filing separately, which makes each of you a 3.

Jointly married people can live together or separately and separately married people can live separately or jointly.

If you are married, jointly is the best way to be. The IRS is not very fond of separately married people.

Jointly married people put all their information nicely together on one form and the federal government gets to believe in happily ever after for a while.

Separately married people each fill out their own forms, with their own information. Some people are separately married and living apart from their spouse. Some are separately married and living with their spouse. If you are separately married, they would like you to talk to each other at least once a year. Some things on your forms have to be the same, like the type of deduction you are taking. Either standard or itemized. You need to talk to your spouse about this or send in your return on January 1. Before your spouse sends his or hers in.

So married people can be married filing jointly or married filing separately unless they are married filing separately and have a dependent child and their spouse does not have to file a return. Then they can be head of household. The government does not care if you ever talk to your spouse if he or she does not have a job!

If any of this is confusing, refer to the instructions with your 1040. All instructions in the IRS publication will be very clear!