My spouse and I were married in July, 2024.
* She was working from Jan - June in MA. I have 0 income in MA.
* I was working from Jan - Oct in NY. She has 0 income in NY.
* We moved to NJ together in Oct.
We are part-time resident in MA, NY, and NJ.
We are still considering married filing jointly if possible due to tax advantages, but feel free to suggest MFS if you think there will be higher risk of tax audits and errors.
* MA: we must file tax return separately because we "were not residents of Massachusetts for the same period of time during the year". We will generate the tax return twice in Turbotax to figure that out.
* NY: we must file tax return jointly as part-time resident together. but I didn't find clarification from the "Filing Status" page of NY tax (https://www.tax.ny.gov/pit/file/filing_status.htm) for part-time + non-resident situation. My understanding is we just need to sign the clarification that she doesn't have income in NY in our joint tax return.
* NJ: we must file tax return jointly as part-time resident together, even though we have different moving in date.
I wonder:
1. Whether my understanding is true?
2. For NJ tax return, if we have different move-in time, when asked about the period of part-time resident, we will use the earliest move in time of one of us. Is that correct?
Thanks for providing me with tax suggestions in advance!
