You can amend your MFS return up to three years later to MFJ.  Under MFS you lose valuable tax benefits.  Has anyone ever done this?  Heather, what is your opinion on this?

Ahhh I missed your post and just posted about the same thing!

Really curious about this, as it’s something I’ve been thinking about for the last couple of years.

If I had to guess, I’d say that Heather is staying away from this question for liability reasons.  Even though the 1040x says that “in general you cannot change your filing status from joint to single after the filing due date,” if you were able to do so, then I doubt the loan servicer would be on the hook for a huge refund to the borrower.  Likewise, the loan servicer probably could not come back at the borrower for “underpayments” for an amendment from single to joint years later.

That makes sense to me.  I called my provider (FedLoans) and straight up asked them if I could ammend,and if there would be any repercussions financially.  I was on hold for quite a bit while the customer service representative went searching for an answer.  All they could really tell me was that my current year’s IBR payment is based on the previous year’s return.  So it wasn’t a yes or no answer, but they made it sound like they weren’t going to go back and check on previous years.  Seems like they are only focused on the here and now.  I’m thinking they are probably pretty content getting those regular, monthly payments year after year, and probably don’t have the time or resources to go back and check on every borrower’s previous returns.  And even if they did, like you said, they probably couldn’t come back for underpayments years later. 

I’m thinking I’ll wait until the three year deadline to ammend, then give it a whirl.  Three years out feels a lot safer to me than one, or maybe two.

Can they actually gain access to an amended return?  When I applied for a direct consolidation loan last week I could choose to link them to our return for 2012.  I didn’t do it because we had filed MFJ.  Instead, I faxed them my MFS 2013.  So, yeah, I will seriously consider filing an amended 2013 sometime during the first three months of 2017.

Thanks for the idea.  I guess we have a while to find out more information about it to keep from screwing ourselves up.

One more thing.  In my direct consolidation loan app I applied for ICR.  We filed MFS.  We are empty nesters.  I said family size was 1 because of our MFS filing.  Can I put 2 since I’m married, but we are MFS?  It doesn’t appear I can, but was not 100% sure.