Does Turbo Tax have a program for paying quarterly capital gains on Real Estate investment sale?

[attipay1971]

Does Turbo Tax have a program for paying quarterly capital gains on Real Estate investment sale? Also, I am sole owner of the property. Do I file Married Single or Married Jointly?

[jtax]

I know this has been around for a while. I'm not certain what you are asking so I'll answer two possible questions

First, TT does not have a program for paying estimated taxes. You can pay directly at the IRS website: https://www.irs.gov/payments or you can mail in paper Form 1040-ESs: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040es.pdf

Second, if you are asking if TT has software to help you figure out how much estimated tax to pay, the answer is yes. It is in the prior year's tax software. This FAQ article gives (link below)  gives you info on that.  Note that the basic idea is either 1) to work through your 2022 taxes to estimate what you owe and pay it via estimates and/or withholding 1/4 each quarter OR 2) to simply pay whatever you tax liability was for 2021 (e.g. Form 1040, line 24, e.g. not line 37.) Sometimes 110% Because #1 is so difficult the safe harbor of #2 is frequently used. NOTE WELL that #2 will mean no interest and penalty even if you owe $1million (or more) on 4/15/2023. However you will have to pay whatever it is owe on 4/15. So if you use #2 be absolutely certain that you can come up with the full amount on 4/15/2023.

https://ttlc.intuit.com/turbotax-support/en-us/help-article/estimated-taxes/turbotax-calculate-next-...

[jtax]

Re: you question at the end about filing status. 

Filing status has nothing to do with how the property was owned. In a joint return you include both spouse's income.

There is no such thing as filing "married single." If you are married on 12/31 your status can be "married filing separately" (MFS) or "married filing jointly." 

Almost always MFS results in more tax being owed. But they only way to know for sure is to compute three tax returns (an MFS for each spouse and a joint return) and compare the total tax owed. 

[NCperson]

@attipay1971 - 96% of married couples file Married-Joint if only because the tax laws motivate that financial behavior.  I've yet to see a situation where the financial situation causes Married - Separate to be a better tax outcome, short of two people making almost exactly the same in wages.

I suspect that last 4% are situations where the spouses simply will not agree to both sign the tax return (and that would include marriages careening towards divorce) or those that just do not understand the financial implications of filing MFS (and I've seen a few where you just can not convince one of the spouses who are sitting side by side with each other while I do their taxes that they are paying more in tax by filing MFS than MFJ)

[jtax]

I agree there are few cases. But there are some. For example, the availability of some deductions depend upon AGI so that a lower AGI can be desirable, e.g. getting medical expenses over the 7.5% floor. Or if a divorce is pending and you don't want to be jointly and severally liable for your soon to be ex-spouses tax debts. In fact I think I once saw a case where one spouse had outstanding tax debt and most of the joint income was from the non-liable spouse. The refund was certainly going to be subject to an offset. I can't quite recall if going down the Injured Spouse Allocation path was better than the MFS route, but we did the analysis. 

But those are certainly outliers.

[Critter-3]

In my professional business we have a MFJ vs MFS split option and  the difference in filing separately rarely shows a better end result and the few that do the few $$ of difference is not worth paying me to file two separate returns.