She does not work and I am the only provider and we have two kids. I saw that they could takeout tax income but what is the possibility of that happening and if they do can I get it back since it’s my income
Wife owes student debt from before marriage and has defaulted payments question
byu/theonewhoislostt inStudentLoans
Posted by theonewhoislostt
6 Comments
Yes you can file an injured spouse claim to get your portion of the refund back. But if she rehabs the loan and gets on ibr and you file taxes separately she’ll have a zero payment and you won’t have to worry about it
If you’re filing taxes as married filing jointly, then it’s not “your” refund. It’s yours and your wife’s. And if your wife has a debt with the federal government, then the federal government can garnish your combined refund to repay that debt.
She should log into her student loan account and determine how to get her loans out of default. If she’s not working, she may be able to find an income-based repayment plan with low payments.
However, I would not simply just ignore her loans, since defaulting will trash her credit which will make it more difficult to access credit in the future (if you want to upgrade your house, car, etc). If you don’t want the government seizing your refund, then you could file your taxes separately, but you’ll sacrifice many of the tax breaks that come with marriage.
If my wife had loans and had sacrificed her career to care for our kids, I would just take over responsibility for paying her loans and consider it a marital debt.
You fill out an injured spouse allocation form with the IRS to get your portion of the taxes back. If she had no income, then they would all come back to you. This is something I might have to do. If she is already in garnishment, you can file the form with your original tax forms.
They can and will take a tax refund for past due student loans. You can however file an injured spouse claim to retain your portion of the tax refund.
I would separate your status as much as possible until you’ve figured it out – I married into a similar situation and we got no benefit from filing jointly – I paid them off last year and have never felt better
In stories like this, I’m always baffled that the person who has student loan debt didn’t use their degree long enough to at least pay their debt off.