Okay, so I know that everyone is annoyed when tax day rolls around… but I’ve got a serious bone to pick with the U.S. government… Let me begin from the beginning….
So, although we’re in the middle of planning a wedding, we’re actually already legally married. When Beau proposed, the only place we could tie the knot in the eyes of the law was in California (oh, the good ol’ days). It was July of 2008 when Beau proposed and the vote on Prop 8 was coming up in November. We felt like July to November just wasn’t enough time to plan the wedding that we wanted. So, we decided that we’d fly out from Baltimore to San Francisco to do the legal knot-tying before the prop 8 vote and then have the big wedding celebration a year later (August, 2009).
So, when it comes to California, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Iowa, Vermont, and DC law… we’re actually already married. Which is why doing our taxes was such a freakin’ downer! Just on a lark, we decided that we’d fiddle with the taxcut software that we bought and see what would happen if we pretended that we could file jointly. And honestly, I really didn’t think it would make that much of a difference. Boy, was I wrong. It turns out that if our marriage was legally recognized by the federal government and we had been able to file jointly, we would have saved $3027. No joke. That is just INSANE! I’m a teacher and Beau is a grad student, we don’t own any property, our car is 10 years old… $3027 is a LOT of money to us.
The craziest part is that I’m entering a doctorate program next year when Beau goes back to full-time work, which means we’ll be in a really similar financial situation for probably the next five years at least… that means that for the years that we will have been in school, we will have been cheated out of $20,000. I can’t even fathom that.
Anyway… it really brought the whole marriage equality fight home to us… yet again.
Wow. Colour me ignorant (and Canadian!), but I never realised that the discrepancy could be that huge. It’s a useful reminder that gay marriage isn’t just an abstract ideological debate but something with such real consequences. You should send a bill for the difference to your governor or something!
Great post! I think it’s really important to talk about the concrete ways we feel the deep injustice of marriage inequality. This is very unfair.
Thanks so much for support! Even after less than one year of marriage, we’ve felt the absence of legal recognition very strongly. Firstly, because of the tax situation. And secondly because I teach at a boarding school where faculty can live on campus without paying for housing or food… in the end, it’s a savings of between $15,000 and $20,000 per year per family. And, although I’ve fought the school on this point and they have finally come around, last year, I was turned away from the opportunity specifically because Beau and I could not be married. So… Already, after mere months of marriage, our legal status has cost us around $20,000 and over the next five or so year, that amount will be almost doubled because we can’t file jointly. So, in five years we’ll be coming up on $40,000 that marriage inequality has cost us… and that’s just five years of marriage… we’re hoping for a lifetime.
And that’s just the financial cost… I could go on and on about all the emotional stuff… but I’ll save that for another post.
[...] i.e. the fact that “opting out” is an expensive, privileged decision. See, for example, this post on So you’re EnGAYged which highlights the financial burden of marriage inequality (for a [...]