My spouse and I have been informally and amicably separated for 7 years. I live in CA and she moved back to NY. Since we have separate primary residences in different states, and we maintain separate household finances, for the past two years we decided to file with TurboTax as Married Filing Separately (MFS), which simplified our tax preparation since we each needed only one state return, and our refunds or taxes owed were separate as well.
The total tax burden of filing MFS versus filing jointly (MFJ) was almost the same, but since my spouse is older and now on Medicare she is greatly penalized by IRMAA for filing MFS, with the two-year IRMAA lookback. We have already filed returns for TY2023 and TY2024 and received federal and state refunds, but we think it would be greatly advantageous to re-file both 2023 and 2024 tax years as MFJ to lower the Medicare IRMAA bracket.
I have two questions:
- How do we get started with re-filing 2023 and 2024 returns as MFJ instead of MFS?
- I created separate TurboTax accounts for each of us filing MFS. Is there a way to import the data entered for our existing MFS returns into a new account filing MFJ so that we don’t have to start completely over from scratch?
Thanks!
