military spouse....how do i file joint on federal but 2 seperate states?????

my husband is in the army and we are stationed in virginia. he files his state taxes in his home of record which is oklahoma and because i work and pay state taxes to virginia that is were i have to file. i know that we can file joint on our federal. but how can how can we go about filing in 2 seperate states when you have to use your adjusted gross income from federal form 1040a ? do i have to figure out our seperate adjusted gross income and use that or does it have to be our combined adjusted gross income? this stuff is all so confusing. you would think the government would make it easier for us spouses and let us choose if we wanted to file in our military spouses home of record. thanks in advance for any help on this matter.

Public Comments

1. Best to ask the IRS, they have a toll free number.
2. If your husband is deployed you can get an automatic extension from the IRS for Federal. Not sure how VA and OK do state taxes but I bet they are similar. As for state you can use Turbo Tax and they have state by state versions. Turbo Tax also has a great help line. Regardless, you should consult with the state help line but I believe you will be able to file in VA and OK married filing separately and just re compute your taxes based on W2s. The state of OK's income tax number is (405) 521-3160 they should be able to help you or direct you to a help line. If your husband has maintained his OK residency his income may be tax exempt. Not sure, some states, Michigan for example, exempt military income. For Virginia the tax help line is 804-367-8031 The State tax web sites are below and I hope they can help. Don't worry you will be able to do this, the states are helpful to service members and their families.
3. Are you doing your taxes by yourself? We had this happen starting last year and will go through it again this year. My husband is an active duty Marine and we are actually in Virginia as well, and his home of record is Ohio. I am from Ohio too, but like you I work in Virginia so I pay taxes here. I am not very well versed in tax preparation, but you can file jointly for both federal and state, they will just put you down as a "nonresident of Oklahoma" in the paperwork and therefore you will partly pay Oklahoma tax as well, but I am not sure how it comes out exactly or if you would end up owing. We pretty much broke even on ours last year. And we actually had to get ours done twice because the first time the state tax was not done correctly, so just make sure your preparer understands you are filing state for 2 different states. Our first preparer (who messed it up) was overriding the questions in the computer to only allow us to file Ohio and we had to do an amended return.