My wife and I were married last October, so we are filing jointly for the 2017 tax season. We have lived together for several years and I have done taxes for both of us, always filing individually before now. She makes roughly $20k and I make roughly $40k. Federal returns for the 2016 tax year were around $1300 for her and $1900 for me. Now that our filing status is married filing jointly, our collective returns are calculated at $1400.
We use Turbo Tax, and our W4 withholdings have not changed during 2017. I believe we may have entered a higher tax bracket as we are filing our income together now, but I wanted to see what the wonderful folks of /r/personalfinance had to say about it before we filed and sucked up the less-than-expected return.
Any advice or questions are warmly welcomed, and I thank you for taking the time to read my inquiry.
UPDATE: One of the users here suggested I re-run our taxes individually to see if I could decipher where the deficit came from. I did this, and I found the culprit.
My wife is a bank teller. In late 2017, her bank merged with another bank. So we have two W2s for her; the first has most of her income for the year ~$20k the second only has ~$3k from after the merge. Upon entering the first W2, the refund looks great and around what she was expecting. BUT, when entering the second W2.. it drops the Federal and State refund tremendously. In fact, it drops by about the amount that we are missing when filing jointly. What could be causing this?
UPDATE 2: I believe I found what was causing it. Out of the ~$3k wages on her second W2, she only paid $140 in federal taxes. Something must have changed with her W4s after the merge took place to where she has paid hardly any taxes, therefore we owe a decent chunk.
FINAL UPDATE: Thank you everyone for your responses. I finally figured out the mystery, this thread is now closed.
Submitted January 25, 2018 at 06:40PM by peckerino http://ift.tt/2nb8IxZ
