BellaOnline Forums Relationships Married No Kids Tax question from a couple DINKs

Hi all,
I just found your Married No Kids forum and I love it.

I have a tax question for you fellow Dual-Income-No-Kid couples.
I'm just wondering if anyone else is getting smacked with the same type of tax bill my wife and I are, and if there's anything we're missing that we should be doing differently with our taxes.

We have a combined income of about $125,000. Our only deductions are our mortgage interest (which is beginning to shrink a lot now that we're almost half paid off), property taxes and state taxes and a some misc. charity. We have some investments that are paying out a couple grand in dividends / interest a year.

We knew we'd be paying (we always do), so we changed our W4s to take out some extra from each of our paychecks. However, when we did our taxes, we still owed a lot, for a total (including the extra from the W4) of just over $4000. We used turbotax and went through every section they had, so I feel pretty confident we aren't missing anything, but we just aren't sure.

Does this sound similar to what others with similar incomes are seeing too? I thought it'd be easy to find DINK tax info on the web, but I really couldn't find much.

Thanks!

My biggest and best reccomendation is not to use Turbotax. We tried it this year and then went to H&R block and our refund nearly doubled. Perhaps you should each claim "0" on your w-4's. YOu will have a lot taken out each week but its better to just a tiny bit each week than a lot once a year.

We're in a similar situation to you guys.
We use TaxCut (from H&R Block), we both claim Married, zero deductions on our W-4s, AND I have $240 extra Federal tax taken each pay (every other week) from my paycheck (our combined income is similar to yours). We are getting a refund from the Feds of approx $2500 (we're also getting some back on our State tax).
The problem is that the payroll depts at your firms don't know what your combined tax bracket is... so they don't know how much tax to take.
You can see from my example that we sent an extra $6240 to the Feds last year but are only getting $2500 back, so if we had not had extra taken out, we would owe big time. We would rather get a nice refund than owe, and it's not a bad way to save...

I suggest upping your tax withholding. Another suggestion would be to contribute more to your 401K plans, which will decrease your taxable income.