Tax ladies - help!

[twinmomma]

Question for those of you who do taxes and money - because I don't know what I'm doing. 

DH and I have always both just claimed 0 on our W4s and never really thought much about it. This past year we just squeaked by and broke even with taxes, didn't owe anything, got a $50 refund. 

While filling out a new W4 for DH, it says he should claim 0 AND have a whole bunch of extra money taken out, based on all the crazy calculations on the worksheet. I don't understand why it's suddenly recommending we take out a ton more money. 

I'm lost on where to go for help - any insight or resources we can check out to figure out if this is correct? The amount it's recommending would pretty severely hurt our budget's bottom line each month. 

[k3am]

I'm no real help. Is he going to make significantly more money at the new job and that throws you into AMT if you weren't there before? Have tax laws changed?

We haven't had extra withholding taxes taken out of our checks, but we do have a separate account that I put that money into each month. Finding out you owe a ton when you're unprepared at tax time is a doozy.

Do you have a financial planner or CPA you can talk to? Or can you find one?

[twinmomma]

k3am, Nope, no raise for him. It's the same job, same salary. I got a 5% raise at the start of the year, so that number changed a little.

I think we will have to hunt down a CPA. Neither of us understands how this randomly changed. We don't make that much money...

[beachbum2]

I am no expert (just took some tax law classes and do our taxes) but that does seems off. Perhaps your income level is high enough that you need to claim zero, but typically for a married couple with deoendants, you would want less withheld so you aren't giving the government an interest free loan all year. But we are still in a fairly average tax bracket.

Taxes have so many variables so I would definitely recommended a CPA. Do you have a thrid source of income (such as a rental house or side business) that you aren't paying taxes on? Are either of you self employed? That would definitely raise your tax liability.

[186momx]

It sound like your W4s are both at M/0 which gave you the right amount of taxes taken out for last year liability. You got a small refund and didn't owe. My advice would be keep that for this year as it doesn't sound like your income jumped that much. I take it your DH is filling his W4 out online and the computer is trying to be helpful. If you want more money withheld but don't want to have to figure out an extra dollar figure you can choose the option of "Married filing as Single" with ZERO dependents. This will take out more taxes than just Married but slightly less than Single filing.
Hope this helps

Congress hasn't passed any tax laws for 2017 so we still are in limbo as to what tax tables and deductions will look like for 2017 taxes. This makes tax planning so difficult as we are just basing our knowledge off last year law.

[twinmomma]

186momx, Thanks! I think you're right - the worksheet is trying to be helpful, but it's not taking everything into account.

I reached out to the CPA my MIL uses, hoping he can give us some advice.