💒 Getting married or divorced this year? Read this first

Filing Made Simple

💍 The filing status decision most newlyweds skip

Getting married changes your relationship status once, at a ceremony, with cake. It changes your filing status every single year, forever, with no cake, whether you think about it or not.

Why most couples file jointly (MFJ)

Where it breaks down: the top bracket. Single filers hit 37% above $640,600; double that would be $1,281,200, but the joint threshold is only $768,700. Two six-figure earners can get shoved into the top bracket faster together than apart — the marriage penalty survives, but mostly for people whose problems we can’t fully relate to.

A few real reasons to file separately (MFS) anyway

If you’re already exposed to a spouse’s tax mess, Innocent Spouse Relief exists — but avoiding the mess is easier than escaping it, same as everything else in a marriage. And this isn’t a one-time choice: you can revisit MFJ vs. MFS every year, the tax code’s version of renewing your vows.

👉 Compare your filing status options

IRS Survival Guide

📋 Your name changed. The IRS is pickier about it than you are.

So you finally married the man of your dreams. You spent months monogramming the towels and practicing your signature. Nobody mentioned that the Social Security Administration also needs to sign off before the IRS will recognize you as, legally, a Smith now.

What to do

Dependents follow the same rule: if a kid’s name recently changed, it needs to match SSA records too, or credits like the Child Tax Credit can get stuck in the same queue.

What if my address changed, too?

Address changes are the quieter cousin of this problem — less dramatic, still capable of ruining your week. No formal SSA-style filing required, but if you move without updating, notices, audit letters, and (increasingly rare) paper checks go straight to your old mailbox, to be read by whoever lives there now. Options:

USPS forwarding buys you a little time, but it expires, like a gym membership, right around when you actually needed it. Between the new name and the new address, you’re basically reintroducing yourself to the federal government — so take the 20 minutes, file the forms, and let the IRS meet the new you before it goes looking for the old one.

👉 Update your name or address with the IRS

Tax Strategies

🧾 Divorce ends the marriage. The IRS still wants one answer: who claims the kids?

Divorce is a legal process with a start date, an end date, and zero interest in your feelings about either. The IRS only cares about one date on the calendar, and it isn’t your anniversary.

Filing status: it’s all about December 31. Married on the 30th, divorced on the 31st? You’re unmarried for the whole year, tax-wise. Most people default to Single, but Head of Household is usually better for a parent and gets skipped constantly. Here’s how you qualify:

Who claims the kid?

The IRS doesn’t read your divorce decree. It counts nights, like a very literal-minded babysitter. The custodial parent — whoever the child spent more nights with — gets the claim by default. If you negotiated something different (alternating years, noncustodial parent claims one kid), the custodial parent has to formally sign that right away on Form 8332. No form, no claim, no matter what the paperwork from your divorce attorney says, and no, your attorney is not going to be the one who explains that to you.

Alimony myth-busting, since outdated advice is everywhere: for any divorce finalized after 2018, alimony is not deductible by the payer and not taxable to the recipient — the opposite of the old rule. Child support has never been either, and never will be; the IRS was never going to let you write off feeding your own kid.

👉 Sort out your post-divorce filing status

Wacky Tax Tales

🎬 Tori Spelling’s divorce came with a $1.7 million surprise from the IRS

If the name doesn’t immediately place her: Tori Spelling spent the ’90s on “Beverly Hills, 90210,” is the daughter of TV megaproducer Aaron Spelling, and has spent the last decade or so as a fairly reliable source of tabloid headlines about her finances.

She and Dean McDermott — her husband of nearly two decades, with whom she shared five kids and several reality shows — finalized their divorce in November 2025. Buried in the settlement paperwork was a number even the tabloids had to sit with for a second: $1.7 million in unpaid taxes, and it didn’t come out of nowhere.

The receipts go back years, because the IRS keeps better records than most relationships do:

Spelling and McDermott’s decree did exactly what divorce decrees are supposed to do — it says, in writing, who owes what. But a divorce decree is an agreement between two exes. The IRS was never a party to it and doesn’t have to honor it. If a couple filed joint returns during the marriage, both carry joint and several liability for the entire balance — meaning the IRS can legally chase either ex for all of it, regardless of what the decree says their “share” is supposed to be.

Spelling and McDermott’s tax bill wasn’t a bad year — it was a decade-long tab that finally came due. The marriage may be history, but the debt lives on.

The quick (and slightly prickly) stories we didn’t have time to get to:

If you made it this far, you’re our kind of nerd. Hit reply and tell us which story you want us to dive deeper into next week.