I moved to the USA in Feb 2019, got married to a US citizen in May 2019 and obtained a work permit/started working in October 2019. This will be our first year filing jointly and we are both self-employed. We've gone through most of the system with TurboTax but there were a few questions that obviously weren't quite tailored to our situation, most revolving around asking questions that would only apply to my wife (having been paying taxes to the IRS for years). For example, we're being charged a penalty for not making estimated payments in 2019, but for me I could have only made estimated payments between October and December, so it seems wrong to be charged a full penalty on that.
I just wondered if anybody here has any tips or tax breaks that would help us, or if my status as a resident alien (awaiting a Green Card) means that we should potentially be filling in any different forms or going about the process differently? I assume whatever we do we're almost guaranteed to have the lowest tax owed by filing jointly rather than 'married separately'?
