Well, we may be a minority within a minority, but I also wish I could contribute to an IRA for my disabled now-spouse for all the previous years (or even just back to 2010) that we were unlawfully prevented from doing this.manwithnoname wrote:Cant make retroactive contributions to an IRA. Under tax law all contributions for a tax year must be made by April 15 of following year.linguini wrote:No idea, but I'm guessing the number of married same sex couples living in a single earner household who wanted to contribute to a spousal IRA but were prohibited at the time and care enough to insist on retroactive contributions must be pretty small, so it doesn't have much practical importance. It's an interesting academic question though.madbrain wrote:I mentioned it in the 5th post in this thread.dphmd wrote:I did not see this point previously commented on, but one of the major changes that will accompany this decision is the way the IRS treats same-sex partner health insurance. With DOMA, even if individuals were legally married, the benefits were considered taxable income (with certain exceptions). Now such benefits will be tax-free for legally-married individuals.
I wonder about spousal IRAs for non-working spouses for those couples refiling their federal tax returns for the last 3 years.
Will the spouses now be allowed to contribute to their IRAs for those years, since they were unlawfully prevented from doing so ?
It's weird, because I feel very fortunate to now be legally recognized as Married by both the Federal Government and the state of New Jersey after being together for almost 33 years. The benefits of marriage are wonderful. But the more you learn about what was denied to you for so long, the more difficult it is to think about the real financial price of that discrimination. And the NJ legislature is considering a bill that will retroactively recognize civil unions as marriage, so that will take us back to 2007, when we got our NJ civil union. But there are limits to how many benefits will be available retroactively.
Oh, well. We are very grateful that we are in a much better position that folks in many US states, and trying to look only to the good things ahead. This board helps all of us learn to maximize what we can looking forward.