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In some situations thousands of tax dollars can be saved by using the married filing separate filing status. However, doing so can trigger a larger income-related monthly adjustment amount (IRMAA) to your Medicare premium.
For example, the surcharge for a single taxpayer with modified adjusted gross income of $104,000 is $69.90 per month, while the same for a married taxpayer filing separately is $384.30. In that situation it will most likely be better to file a joint tax return and pay the extra income tax.
Be sure to consider IRMAA when choosing your filing status. Here is the IRS link for the surcharges.
https://www.ssa.gov/forms/ssa-44.pdf
Good post Dan.
IRMAA can also hit you if you do a large IRA to Roth transfer or have a large capital gain. It only takes $1 over the threshold to invoke the entire penalty.