Long Wedding Dress for Couple with Flowers (Photo credit: epSos.de)
We’re smack in the middle of wedding season across most of the country. Statistically, more couples will tie the knot in June than any other month but the official popular ‘season’ runs from Memorial Day Weekend through Labor Day – kind of like vacation season.According to The Wedding Report, nearly 2.1 million couples got married in the U.S. in 2010; on the other end of the spectrum in that same year, there were at least 872,000 divorces according to the National Vital Statistics System for the Center for Disease Control (although, according to their site, some data is missing from their report).
Making big lifestyle changes like getting married or divorced often has obvious tax consequences. But one of the biggest tax consequences can be the headache of simply changing your name: a mismatch between the name on your federal income tax return and Social Security Administration records can cause problems come tax time.
If you change your name as a result of marriage or divorce, you’ll need to make sure that you take the proper steps to update the change with Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Here are a few tips for dealing with the SSA and IRS after a name change:
If take your spouse’s last name or if both spouses hyphenate their last names – or if you use a new combined name – after marriage, you must notify the SSA. If you change your name back to your prior name after a divorce, you’ll also need to notify the SSA.
More info at Forbes.
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