Please explain to me like I'm 5. My wife and I are terrible at numbers and clearly haven't been doing our taxes correctly after marriage.
For our 2025 taxes, my wife and I owed $391 in federal tax and $1,540 in California state tax.
We have one dependent that I claim.
We just use turbo tax and don't do complicated line items or deductions etc.
Some background: We noticed my wife’s withholding is set to S00 for both federal and CA state.
My previous withholding was M02 for both federal and state.
Our monthly gross incomes are:
Wife: $7,320 Me: $9,311 We both get paid once a month with this amount.
Recently, I changed my withholding to:
Federal: S0 State: S02
This resulted in about $493 less take-home pay per month.
We’re trying to adjust so that we either: break even at tax time, or get a small refund (not a large one).
Given our income split and current settings, how should we adjust our withholdings to get closer to that goal without overcorrecting?
Should we both be filing married or single and what numbers should we be using? It's so confusing. Thank you all!