grr…Dealing with a tough situation here and was hoping I can get some advice.

Last year my wife and I were married.  She is about to enter her 3 year of IBR on the PSLF program.

My wife has $100k in student loans.  Being in the public sector, the obvious move for her at the time was to apply for IBR in the PSLF program in a “run out the clock” scenario moving towards having her loans forgiven after 10 years.  Unfortunately now that we are married we are dealing with a Married Filing Separate vs Jointly problem.

My income is about $170k and I have no student loan debt.  If we were to file jointly this would dramatically increase her monthly student loan payments, however if we file separately we lose a substantial tax savings.  We are about to buy our first home and kids are only a year or two away.  I feel like this is a catch-22 situation as we either dramatically increase our student loans by filing together or lose a ton of advantages in tax savings when you have a house and kids by filing separately.  Filing separately is about the worst thing you can do in regards to taxes.

This seems like quite a unique situation given my high income and I can’t find any great advice out there.  Hoping someone here can help.  What do we do.

Thanks in advance

The situation you are facing is exactly the same as my husband and I… I am the one with the high debt and he is the high earner. We have done a lot of research on this issue ourselves and unfortunately there is literally nothing you can do other then figure out which is the worst of the bad choices. You have to work with a tax professional to estimate how much money you will be losing over the next 8 years filing separately vs. the money you would be paying back in student loans. Sadly, the only other option (which isn’t really an option for most people) is divorce! Also keep in mind the state you live in because for some states such as AZ and TX which are community property states, filing separately wouldn’t help you anyway.