I have two major events happening this year: buying a house (yay!) and getting married (yay!!). The house is already done; wedding in October.
Both these events will have significant tax consequences. I’d like to know how to adjust my withholding to take these into account.
I can use TurboTax and combine my and my fiancee’s last returns, change the marital status, and see what the impact is on the bottom line…but that doesnt tell me what to put on my W-4.
There are calculators out there that will tell me what the impact on my paycheck will be if I put a “3” in the box on the W-4 (for example), but not necessarily whether “3” is the right number.
So does anybody have a link to a website that will tell me the right number?
I don’t know of any calculators that do it that way. You might want to just download Publication 15, find your payroll frequency and your expected pay per period. The line on that table will show the per-paycheck withholding at each level of allowances. Multiply that amount by the number of pay periods per year, and you’ll know how much each option will have withheld. Then pick the the number of allowances that is closest to what you want.
This should be possible in an automated reverse look-up, but I just haven’t ever seen one work that way.
Having been through this, I understand your frustration. What I did was to fill out the worksheets on the W-4 form as best I could to get an estimate of the number of allowances to take. Then I took one or two fewer allowances so that I had more withheld, just in case my estimates were off. (I’d rather end up with a big refund than a big tax due bill.)
That’s the best I could do because in some years, with major life changes, my estimates for things like salary and mortgage deductions my estimates were very rough. But in the end it worked OK, from my point of view: mostly I had refunds, and when I did owe money it was never enough to incur penalties.