Yep your advice makes a lot of sense. I guess I'm just having trouble figuring how the MFJ filings would work in our case.
So for Federal, we'll file MFJ and I'll report all my income for the year (7 months from CA, 5 months from WA).
Then for CA, we'll file a 540NR (MFJ) with the following calculation:
Assuming I made $10K per month and moved from CA to WA on August 1st and got married on December 1st, I would have a total AGI of $120K, and a CA AGI of $75K (7 months of $10K while in CA, and $5K from the 1 month of community income). And then I would only pay CA state taxes on $75K of income, and 0 state taxes (WA) on the remaining $45K of income.
Am I approaching this correctly?
