Ep. 113 | Should You Pay Your Spouse? Tax Benefits and Pitfalls

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Welcome back to the teaching tax flow podcast episode 113 today. We promise they did not send us this question to convince you of, but we are gonna answer it the best we can, which is, should I pay my spouse? But before we dive into this one specifically, let’s take a brief moment and thank our episode sponsor.

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Alright, everyone. You’re back here again with teaching tax flow. As you heard in the intro there, we are gonna talk about, should you pay your spouse? Or even if you’re not the one in question here, your spouse is probably wondering or interested, right, if you should be paying them. So as I mentioned there in the intro, all kidding aside, we are gonna talk about your business, not all your business, but to a certain extent.

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And best person we can think of to do that, Chris Baciro. Welcome back to your own show, buddy. How’s it going?

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Oh, man. Happy holidays. It’s great to be back with you and the teaching tax flow community. We’ve just had an amazing, just run of really good shows, guests, variety of topics, and I wanna personally thank, the teaching tax flow community, specifically our private Facebook group, if you are hearing this. And you’re in our group, it’s called defeating taxes.

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Give yourself a round of applause. Congratulations. If you are not in defeating taxes, now you’re on Santa’s bad list. Let’s get you in there. Yeah.

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Don’t get on the bad list, John. And, go just go to defeating taxes.com. Defeating taxes.com will get you right there. You can post anonymously in there. It is a community that we work together.

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It’s there are taxpayers, there are tax professionals, there are strategic tax planning implementation partners in there to legally and escalate to defeat the tax defeat taxes or reduce taxes you pay in your lifetime. Why am I going on about this fine group? Because this group is the one that gives us a ton of show ideas, including this one. This is a common question we get in our privacy pay practice, but it’s also, you know, John, you’ve been you’ve been traveling around with the with, on on the teaching tax flow bandwagon for a few years now. And, you you hear the questions and and they’re valid questions.

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And a lot of times, you do have a business where there are 2 spouses working in the business, and it might make sense to pay 1 of us or pay, your spouse. Let’s say you all you’re the only owner of a business, but your spouse is working in that business. It might make sense to pay your spouse. It doesn’t always make sense. And, actually, probably the majority of the time, it does not.

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But when it does, it can have a really good impact on your tax return.

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And you bring up that good point too. Like, we’re we’re gonna look at it only from the tax perspective, not the not the, you know, keeping your spouse happy by giving them a paycheck point of view. That’s a whole another thing. We are not, we are not in the, relationship counseling business nor nor should we be. Well, you know, we could probably, you know, we could probably do a pretty good job of that if we wanted to, but, you know, I look forward to this one.

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I think the biggest things that we’ll get out of this, right, is, you know, what are the advantages of it, but then also when are the most common and best scenarios where it makes sense, but then also when it doesn’t make sense? Because I think, Chris, you bring up that point too. You know? As I’ve been, you know, traveling around with with you guys for a while now, it’s you do see a lot of the same questions just asked in different ways where it’s really the same thing. You know?

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Should you be paying your spouse if they do nothing? Absolutely not. You know? It’s it’s anyways, I I won’t give I won’t give away any teasers to it.

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There are nontax factors that we’re not gonna dive into. However, let’s take a look at when does it make sense to hire your spouse or pay your spouse? When does it not? A lot of it is what we’ve stolen from our friends in the military community, situationally dependent. Right?

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And we have to and a lot of it has to do with diff where your marginal tax rate, what type of entity you are, what type of profit you have in your business. Remember, diagnose, prescribe. Right? Figure out where you’re at. Your marginal tax rates, your number one key performance indicator when it comes to tax planning and strategy, and that should drive a lot of your decisions tax wise.

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So let’s talk about when it makes sense to hire a spouse. Okay? Number one reason would be is and and again, these are all on to the assumption that the spouse is doing legitimate work for legitimate pay within the business. But the number one reason would be so that that you can contribute to a retirement plan for that spouse. Now what type of retirement plan?

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Well, it’s gonna depend on what your situation is, and typically, we’ve got 2 options when it comes to retirement plans. We’ve got your more traditional tax deferred plans. It’s gonna be like a 401 k, a SEP IRA where there’s an employer employee contribution and an employer match. Simple IRA is another one. And, so if you are what’s called a red diagnosis on the teaching tax flow community, red means high marginal tax rate.

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That means that tax deferral and immediate tax deduction and tax deferral, which is our purple diagnosis, might make sense for you. So if you’re in that phase of life and you’re in that marginal tax rate where you’re trying to maximize the amount of money you fund into your retirement plan and your spouse is working in the business, this could double up the amount you can put into a retirement plan because why? You have 2 participants. Probably my favorite my favorite option for paying a spouse is someone that might be self employed, and they hire their spouse for legitimate work, and they actually implement a solo 401 k plan. With a solo 401 k plan, even though it’s a solo plan, you and your spouse only count as can still contribute to that.

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And you can sock away over a $100,000 a year. Now you have to be careful. You have to make sure that you don’t have any other employees or eligible employees to participate in the plan. And eligible employees of that definition has changed a lot with secure 2.0 act. But ultimately, if you’re listening to this and you have a spouse that works in your business and you want to maximize you’ve already maxed out the amount you could put in your retirement plan and you’re trying to contribute more for your spouse, and this could even be defined benefit plans.

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Whatever plan it is, that would make the argument to yes. Let’s hire the spouse so it makes sense. Mhmm.

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So struck a good a good chord there too when you talked about, you know, legitimate work right out of the gate. Let’s and then that’s probably a really good starting point here too, Chris, because I you know, that’s one of the things that I see majority of you know, say there’s a group of 6 of us. We’re talking then, you know, it’s it’s a little bit different if we’re at a tax pro event where it’s all tax professionals because I think, you know, you guys all know the answer to it. But every once in a while, somebody comes out like, oh, well, I’m gonna I’m gonna pay my 2 year old. It’s like, what exactly is your 2 year old doing in your, you know, real estate flipping business?

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You know, is your, is your 2 year old dragging around a table saw or driving the truck? Probably not, But in some some businesses, you know, there aren’t certain types of individuals. And I think that carries through too. I mean, I’m not gonna point any names out here because I can think of one of my friends that I’m pretty sure that his his wife congratulations to him. I think he just got married about 6 months ago, but I’m pretty sure she’s on the payroll, and she does absolutely nothing.

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Again, I’m just making that assumption. But, yeah, it’s a that’s a big question.

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What’s your buddy’s name, John?

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Well, it’s actually John Chapalski. Okay.

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Well, he’s the thing. You’re you’re you’re touching on paying you know, income shifting between family members is a tax strategy. Right? Income shifting to children is a subs is a sub strategy of that. Income shifting to parents is another one.

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Income shifting to spouse, which we’re talking about right now, or paying your spouse is is a sub strategy of shifting income. Now it’s different when you’re paying your spouse because ultimately 99% of the time, you’re filing the tax return together anyway. So you’re so that’s where it’s a different calculus compared to shifting to pea people that are not you’re not filing a tax return with. That’s the thing that we have to remember when it when it comes to spouse.

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Good point. Very good point.

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Yeah. So the second so we’ve got three reasons why you should you potentially hire your spouse. Not tax related. Okay? There’s tax.

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Okay.

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I like I like how you brought that one back into the mix. We cannot forget about that one. So

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Okay. Yeah. I mean, I guess there could be a 4th, but let’s go number 2, to create deductible benefits. So here’s the situation. Let’s say you’re self employed, Right?

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And you have a a spouse that’s helping you work in business, and you’re paying a bunch of medical expenses. Your health insurance premiums are deductible. However, let’s say you have a lot of medical expenses. Real story, we had a I worked with a a taxpayer, on a personalized tax plan, is in the medical field, self employed, no employees, and their spouse, their spouse works and helps with the billing and the bookkeeping in the business. This couple has a special needs child.

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They’re spending about $40,000 a year on out of pocket medical impact expenses therapy, all deductible. However, there it’s only a personal deduction subject to 7 a half percent of their income, so they can only deduct the amount that exceeds 7 a half percent of their income as an itemized personal deduction. Ultimately, the vast majority of this is is a personal expense. Well, that we ended up hiring the spouse for the legitimate work and implementing something called the section 105 plan, which is a health reimbursement arrangement. And now the employer, right, the the the medical professional is paying for the employee.

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Now it’s the only employee, which happens to be its spouse, out of pocket medical expenses. So the the the employee pays the out of pocket medical expenses and submits a reimbursement, request to the employer, and the employer reimburses the spouse for the expenses. And now the $40,000 of medical expenses are considered an employee benefit, tax deductible, unscheduled c with this this this tax fair happened to be self employed. Ended up saving that $15,000 a year when you add it up in in tax. So that’s so there are other tax deductible benefits that could occur.

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What if you’ve got 2 people that are looking for health insurance and they need group health insurance? Well, you know, they might put both spouses on the payroll. So there’s a lot of reasons where you would situations where a spouse would be hired in that employee role to give them tax deductible employee benefits. In a bigger, in a bigger company, we talk to them talk about section 125 plan benefits. Right?

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So if you’re let’s say you work at a large company, you know, you get a group life insurance, you get your employ you get a portion of your health insurance paid for. You might get a a health savings account contribution. You might get dependent care benefits. You might get reimbursed for educational, expenses for, you know, college or university. You can potentially use all those benefits as a small employer and hire your spouse.

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And it really works if the spouse is your only employee. That means there’s a business deduction and the spouse picks it up as an tax free fringe benefit. So if you are in a situation where you feel that you don’t have any other employees and your spouse is helping in the business, and you feel like you’re paying a lot of expenses that could be a benefit if you were an employee somewhere, you might be in a situation where you wanna hire a spouse to create these tax deductible benefits.

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And just to throw it out there too, Chris. So we’re talking about hiring potentially hiring a spouse as an employee, not a contractor. This is not, oh, well, I’m gonna have I’m just gonna cut them a check randomly once a year as a consultant. Doesn’t work that way. This is somebody and and then hiring them out as an employee is actually putting them on a legitimate payroll too.

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So this is not a again, just swiping a check over. Every once in a while, this would have to go through a legitimate payroll system, in theory. Correct?

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In that case, for for tax deductible benefits, it does have to be an employee relationship. For contribute contributions to retirement plan, it could be a a single member LLC and the spouse is brought on as a second owner that’s, you know, in or paid, you know, as an independent contractor, and they contribute to their own retirement plan. But in general, we’re talking about as an as an employee. That is correct. Now the third reason would be is to reduce self employment tax.

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Now we know that self employment tax is is 15.3%, and it’s paid, on your, your self employed earnings or w two wages, and there’s a Social Security cap every year. So what happens sometimes is that some I’ll give you a real example of this. You have a client. I so we had someone in our in our community, in our teaching tech flow community, and there were 2 spouses that were, coaches. Okay?

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And I’m not gonna get into the industry or anything like that because you could have any type of coach actually. Doesn’t necessarily have to be athletic, but they’re coaches, and they have a business together. And one of them, though, has another job where they’re compensated rather well, and they’re making about $200,000 a year on a w two. Well, that person’s already, that spouse is already paid into their maximum social security cap. So it’d save a lot of money.

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If we allocated 50% of the revenue from the business, let’s say it’s a multi member LLC, to the spouse that has a w two job and has already maxed their social security tax instead of just allocating it to the one spouse and having the other spouse be free labor. Again, it has to be legitimate. But number 3, to reduce self employment tax. And that could be, a variety of reasons. And it could be where some one of the 2 spouses is already at that social security wage based limit.

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So there’s there’s it or it could go the other way, John. I’ve seen it the other way. I’ve seen it where clients let’s talk about multi member LLCs. Let’s say a client set up a multi member LLC. It’s a it’s a it’s a 2 spouse partnership.

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1 of the spouses is working in the business full time. The other one is just helping out. But when they started it, they just slap both of them on the LLC. Right? So each of them are getting allocated a $100,000 worth of let’s say let’s say there’s a profit of $300,000.

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Each spouse is allocated a $150,000 worth of profit, and is it and they’re both paying self employment tax on all $150,000. Well, if one of the spouses is really doing all the work and the other one’s kinda not doing a lot of work, you might wanna especially allocate, you know, $250,000 of income for 1 spouse and only 50,000 to the other one because they’re not doing as much work. That would save you from the 2nd spouse paying self employment tax on a $100,000. In round numbers, that saves you $15,000 in tax. So it depends on, you know, the situation.

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So point is, if you’re in a situation where both spouses are working together and you feel like you’re getting hammered with self employment tax, you might wanna re you might wanna relook at how the income is allocated, especially if you got one working in the business more than the other.

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Mhmm. And I know we mentioned earlier and another one’s to everything situationally dependent. There’s really no yes, no very binary answer to any of these. Right? Every every situation is different in some way or another.

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Like you just use that example, right, of you might have a multi member LLC, which that’s a different scenario than it is is is likely many others. So it’s kind of looking at it as a, you know, I don’t use that word holistically very often. I feel like it got kinda burnt out back in the day. Every everything was looking at it holistically, you know, 10 years ago, but with with a fresh set of eyes, if you will. They’re from a bird’s eye view and looking at it and saying, oh, well, does it make sense?

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And, you know, like the examples you gave there, just not really, I shouldn’t say reinventing everything, but just kind of reallocating and shifting things around may make a lot of sense. And it’s not like you’re trying to beat the IRS at their own game. You’re just setting it up. You’re just setting it up a different way.

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Correct. So there’s a yeah. Absolutely. So reasons, potentially increase the amount you could put in your retirement plan, potentially create tax deductible benefits, or potentially reduce your self employment tax exposure. The 4th one could be potentially to give them, if they’re working in the business, to give them some Social Security benefits, so to get money paid into the Social Security system.

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Sometimes people do that, You know, we gotta look at the ROI of the social security system, but sometimes, you know, that that could happen. Now let’s talk about the flip side. When does it make sense not to hire your spouse from a tax perspective? Right? First one would be if it’s we kinda met we mentioned this as as in the beginning, if it’s abusive.

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Right? If you’re if if the person’s not not like, you’re living your buddy who has allegedly hired their spouse and the spouse is doing no work. That’s abusive. Right? Remember, reasonable compensation for the work that’s being done.

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Number 2, what if the administrative burden outweighs the benefit? When you hire someone, you’ve got payroll. You have to process payroll. That’s there’s a cost to that. Let’s say it’s $600 a a a year.

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Right? And let’s say there’s some time involved. Now if if you’re listening to this and you are worried about processing payroll, please let us know. We’d had an amazing, podcast called modern payroll by our friends at Gusto. We can get you connected with them to make sure that it’s a it’s a little cost as possible, but you still there’s still responsibility and cost associated.

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So I’m not gonna spend $600 a year to save $200. Right? That that’s silly. What if, when, you know, administrate or another another issue could be, someone, you know, adds their spouse to their LLC and now all of a sudden you’ve got a partnership tax return. You’ve got 1,000 of dollars of tax preparation fees that you didn’t have before for a minimum benefit.

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So the cost part of teaching tax flow, diagnose, prescribe, IQ test, which means your financial fitting room, doesn’t make sense tax wise, and implement. So the the administrative cost might outweigh the benefit. Let’s say your spouse already has employee benefits and just like health insurance and and all these other things with a, another employer. So by implementing a, you know, an employee benefit plan when they already have these benefits somewhere else, obviously, that wouldn’t, you know, that wouldn’t work. You could also trigger more tax.

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You could train, you could actually increase the amount of self employment tax inadvertently without the proper planning. So that’s another thing. And you got them in, in, in you gotta make sure that the spouse, let’s say you’ve got, you know, we’ve got some clients and we we we have people in the future in tax law community where it might make sense to pay the spouse, but we might have a spouse that’s on disability. And they’re not they’re in or maybe they’re drawing social security and the amount of income that they can earn is limited at this point. And during that period of time where they if they earn too much income, they’d have to pay 50% of it back.

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So you’ve gotta look at the like, you you mentioned holistic. You’ve gotta look at the entire picture before we say, yeah. Let’s, you know, let’s let’s go for it. So

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Talk about a big uh-oh moment. Right? If you look at this, you’re like, yeah. I did a great thing last year. Brought my spouse on board.

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And then all of a sudden, you’re like, oh, crap. I’m now I’m having to pay all these extra admin fees and old jeez. Now my taxes are actually higher than before. I probably should have talked to somebody about that. Oh gosh.

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I can only imagine somebody is kind of smack in the smack in the face when that happens. Right. And that’s a knee jerk reaction to some of the stuff. I mean, I’ll bring up the example too about, you you see it a lot. You know, social media is a great tool, but it’s also a a nasty little bugger when, you know, you’re hearing bits of information.

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Oh, go out and buy a 6,000 pound vehicle at the end of the year, and they don’t explain anything about it. And you go out and buy a truck, and you’re, oh, man. Bull

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Yeah.

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Crap. I still have to pay for this thing. It’s not free. And, you know, that’s just my favorite example.

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No. I mean, buying a vehicle, in my opinion, is not a tax strategy. It’s it’s a business decision that has a tax benefit. A protect an immediate tax benefit. It’s not, it’s not a strategy.

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You know? Well, to put a bow on it, let’s think about this. What are the pros? Right? You could potentially create, tax deductible wages for the business.

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Again, you’re gonna be filing together. You might be able to enable retirement plan contributions, health insurance premiums. You could keep your income household income within the family. So let’s say, I mean, let’s say you own a business and and one of your you know, you have an office manager that leaves the company, and you think your spouse is a great fit for that. It could that could that could work, and it could reduce self employment income.

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What are the negatives? Potential IRS audit risk if the employment is not legitimate. You could actually increase your household taxes. Right? You could have there could be an administrative burden, and you you could be paying, like I said, extra Social Security taxes on top of the administrative burden.

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So let’s think about things, think about if this might make sense. Again, if you know someone or yourself, has a business and you have a spouse working in the business, think about compensation planning as a really great tax planning tool. And join us in the defeating taxes private Facebook group.

00:23:30.270 –> 00:23:48.955
Awesome. Where we provide great tax information and no, no spousal consulting. So we’ll leave that to somebody else in the next. But, yeah, hopefully hopefully, you guys have listened to this or or had the opportunity to actually watch this if you can. You know, I I didn’t make any, funny faces at Chris this episode, so you you we don’t sorry.

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You won’t get any of those. But, as we mentioned here, I think this is a great way to look at it. You know, it’s our goal here is really to give you the information. And as we mentioned, every situation is so different. You know, take a look at what you have.

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Talk with your, you know, your personal board of directors as we’ve referenced in many, many podcasts now. That’s your tax professionals, your attorneys, anybody who you can think of that you kinda surround yourself with or get in your circle and look at it and say, you know, does this make sense for me? You know, it’s and, again, it might, it might not. It might sound better than it is in your certain situation, but, really, you’re the one that has to take the first step to figure that out. So take a look at it.

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Hopefully, you guys have good information from this. Any questions, drop us a line directly, or as Kristen mentioned, you know, get in that private Facebook group, drop them in there. Tons of individuals in there that can give you some great information. We do a pretty good job of monitoring that too. So if anything’s said or referenced that, you know, we might deem as not exactly the best, we usually, can weed those out.

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But, really, we haven’t had a we haven’t even had to do that yet. So we haven’t had to play, you know, the mom or dad coming in and slapping any hands. So everybody’s made of their self pretty good. So as we say that, let’s wrap this one up. We are in the thick of the holiday season, so we imagine you’ll have a little bit of extra time on your hands.

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You know, after between the family showing up or leaving, hop online. Hop on. Check us out. So, obviously, if you haven’t watched us on YouTube, check those videos out. We started way back in episode 100, posting those on there.

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Let us know what you think. As Chris mentioned also, let us know some of the topics that you may wanna hear us discuss. We’ve got a good amount of them planned out, I think, even into 25, but, you know, everything’s, everything’s pretty fluid. So we we can change things up as needed. And, again, the community is pretty much what drives our content here on the podcast.

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So shoot us those content ideas. Shoot us those questions. Shoot other those others those questions, and we will see you back here again on the Teaching Tax Full podcast next week, roughly the same time, totally different topic. Have a great week, everybody.

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