Tax Planner - Surviving Spouse

Question

I have questions on setting up Lifetime Planner (LP) for 2025. My husband passed away in 2024 and he was designated as "self" and I am "spouse" in our Quicken settings.  I changed the 2025 setting in LP from MFJ to Surviving Spouse, but I ran into problems. All spouse items are now greyed out, including the over-65 checkmark. That screws up tax calculations.  I also have a small business, and all details are greyed out on LP and I can't see any 2025 transactions.

Is there any way to fix this? Changing me to "self" will affect historical information for my data including my small business and any of my husband's data.

Thanks, JB, using Quicken Windows Home & Business R60.20, a user since the DOS days!

markus1957 · Answer

Sorry for your loss. Full disclosure, I'm not very familiar with business integration with Tax Planner. Looking at the way businesses are set up in Quicken, no easy solution comes to mind.

A new file would be cleanest, but you lose a lot of history and switching between data files in Quicken is a pain.

Changing ownership of the business to self would require switching tax lines in all of your business categories to self tax lines from spouse tax lines. That will definitely have a ripple effect on historical information but is probably pretty clean going forward.

Creating a new business in the existing data file with self as the owner should allow you to preserve the history in the file and start fresh with the ability to look back at the old business as needed. It would require you to assign categories to transactions that have self tax lines, so they show up in the Tax Planner. That shouldn't be a big issue for default categories, but you would need to duplicate custom categories with slightly different names and assign a self tax line.

These are my initial thoughts. Hopefully a business user will weigh in with some suggestions. If not, feel free to post additional questions as you consider your best option.

mshiggins · Answer

@RelayMoM so sorry for your loss.

I went ahead and edited the title of your post to show Tax Planner instead of Lifetime Planner. Hopefully one of the Tax Planner experts, like @markus1957, will be able to help.

RelayMoM · Answer

Yes, of course, I meant Tax Planner, under the Planning Tab Not Lifetime Planner.