Many young couples start out married life without a clear idea of how to handle their finances — leading to stress, arguments, and long-term marital problems.

And correspondingly, there are some couples for whom finances have become a painful wedge. So, though I don’t fashion myself to be a “marriage expert”, I have seen many financial partnerships work well … and more than I’d like, of those that didn’t.

Here are some ideas for you, as well as a little gift idea at the end.

Don’t avoid the hard stuff.
Whether you are in a pre-marriage stage, or are already working through your partnership, it’s crucially important to learn the skill of conversation about finances. There can be so much mental anguish over shame, fear, and past pain that unhealthy communication patterns begin to emerge.

So give yourselves the gift of honesty, and make a list of hard topics that you can tackle over time.

As an example, many couples are afraid to talk about the three D’s: debt, death, and disability. Take time to discuss these fears instead of avoiding them. Planning will help you both feel better.

Talk through your different money backgrounds.
How we were raised has an enormous effect on how we deal with money. Depending on what your home was like as a child, you likely heard many different attitudes expressed around the dinner table, and they have doubtless shaped your financial paradigm as an adult. Whether from poverty, or from abundance, your background is extremely powerful.

So, if your money attitude differs from your spouse’s, talk about how you were raised and work toward a compromise where you can strengthen each other’s weaknesses.

Put yourself in each other’s shoes.
If one of you usually pays all the bills, switch for a couple of months. You or your partner may get a crash course on how much running the household actually costs. Keep track of all spending for at least one billing cycle (usually one month) to actually see where your money is going, and decide which expenditures can be decreased or eliminated. You might even find opportunities to give.

Maintain (small) independence.
A joint checking account is useful, but maintain some kind of separate amount of money as a “slush fund” of sorts, whereby you can each make purchases without mutual consent. Keep these amounts small (you always want partnership in the big amounts), but a sense of independence (however symbolic) will help both of you feel you have equal footing in the relationship, even if you have a big difference in salaries.

Work together to build something financial.
Find a way to work together on a small, money-related project, whether playing the stock market or saving towards some small goal. Pick something that doesn’t carry emotional weight, and see it as an exercise. You’ll find that working together in a small way will help you in a BIG way, as your decisions become more significant.

Agree together that you won’t lose on your taxes.
Obviously, this is what we are here for, and perhaps one of the best gifts you can give yourselves is a workable plan as it relates to a tax strategy.

Maybe you’re a student or you made enough money at that summer job to file a tax return, and you’re totally lost! Here are a few tips to keep in mind and get started.

First of all, make sure you even need to file! You can go to the IRS website and take a quick survey to determine if you’re eligible to file:  https://www.irs.gov/help/ita/do-i-need-to-file-a-tax-return

Keep your documents organized! This is especially important for any of you that did any freelance work or had any self-employment income (which will be reflected on Form 1099). Make sure you save those documents and make copies of any forms, important receipts, etc.

Check with your parents to see if they are claiming you as a dependent! If they have been claiming you previously and you still qualify as a dependent for them, you will need to know that information when filing. You will need to indicate whether or not someone is claiming you as a dependent on their return when filing your own.

File early or at least give yourself enough time to file! The deadline to file is around the middle of April (this past year it was the 18th). Don’t wait until the last minute to file in case there is any confusion or if you need help. If it comes down to the wire, make sure you at least file an extension. This gives you an additional six months to file (but not to pay if you were to owe anything).

Do NOT fall for tax scams! Our very own Sierra’s brother-in-law had a roommate who fell for one of these scams. She had never filed her own return before (her parents always took care of it), and received a call from the “IRS” claiming that there was a warrant for her arrest due to unpaid taxes. They asked her for over $1000 in iTunes gift cards (by the way, the IRS 1) doesn’t initiate contact by phone unless perhaps the taxpayer has reached out by phone and 2) DO NOT EVER ask for payment with iTunes gift cards!!!!). She had no experience with dealing with her taxes, didn’t contact her parents, and went right up to the street to a Best Buy and bought the gift cards.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help! Whether it’s your parent or a professional, if you are confused AT ALL, ask for help before you make an error on your return.

Use your refund wisely! You might feel compelled to spend that refund on all the fun things, but maybe put that in a savings account, pre-pay a bill you have, or invest it! It is never too early to start being smart with your money.

One of our more fascinating cases began with an administrative assistant at a major industrial firm being convicted of embezzling over $200,000 from her company. She had been convicted, but in exchange for early release, she had agreed to pay back half of the money she had taken (Sounds like a good deal to me!)

After she was released and in the process of paying the money back, she received notification from the IRS that the total amount of the embezzled funds would be taxed to her as income.

She thought surely she would only be taxed on the amount that she had kept but after hiring two different attorneys, she was left holding the bag for income tax on the full amount she had taken.

You see, there is a section in the Internal Revenue Code that says that money received from an illegal source will be taxed fully as earned income.

Dang those blasted ill-gotten gains!

After losing an appeal twice with the IRS, she was referred to us by another attorney friend of hers.

She tells me her story, and I’m thinking to myself, “This one may require a little extra elbow grease!”

After she finished, she asked me what I thought. I told her first thing that I couldn’t make any promises. And that we may get the exact same result as her first two tries at getting the tax thrown out.

This was gonna require some serious creative thinking.

I pondered her situation for at least an hour a day for four days straight, and then it dawned on me…

If you have, say, a construction business and you build houses, your Cost of Goods Sold is your expense for the “sticks and bricks” and labor for building the house.

Similarly, I reasoned, her “expense” of paying back the money represented her deductible cost of “doing business”…never mind that it happened to be an illegal business.

So we prepared our appeal to “adjust” the tax liability that Uncle Sam was charging for her shady activities.

Our initial appeal was rejected, just like the appeals of the previous two attorneys. So we went back to the well.

Somehow, we eventually got a decisions in our/her favor. She would only be taxed upon the funds that she kept, not the full amount that she had originally taken.

I’ll never forget the day she received a sizeable refund check from the IRS. Close to $50,000. She was ecstatic, as you might imagine.

She very graciously said she and her husband would be sending a bonus our way, which she did very soon. And she and her family continued as clients for the next 15 years.

Ever hear of an entertainer and songwriter named George M. Cohan?

He’s the guy that wrote “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag”.

It seems that Mr. Cohan’s income tax returns were audited in the 1940’s for a year during which he had travelled with his show for more than 30 weeks during the year.

Unfortunately, Mr. Cohan had not maintained records to back up the expenses he claimed on his tax return. So the IRS examiner disallowed most of his business expenses out of hand.

Fortunately, the story doesn’t end there.

He appealed the IRS’ disallowance, and eventually the U.S. Tax Court found in his favor.

Thus, his estimated expenses were all allowed and the “Cohan Rule” has held up since then. We have cited it in numerous cases where original records are found to be lacking or even non-existent.

What does this mean for business owners everywhere? It means that if you can reasonably estimate valid expenses for which you have no original records, it is acceptable for you to claim a deduction.

The “Cohan Rule” came in very handy indeed for the thousands of professional drivers, construction contractors, and even doctors and lawyers from the New Orleans area that were left with no records after Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on that area just over ten years ago.

Separate from the Cohan Rule, you may have had a situation where you actually had good records for, say, three or more consecutive months of the year. The IRS will often allow you to estimate or reconstruct your expenses for the periods for which you don’t have records, if your income was relatively steady throughout the year.

Both of these remedies can make a huge difference when the auditor has initially said “no receipts, no deduction”. They will likely need to be brought up on appeal. But they can save you from writing a 5-figure check to your least favorite government agency.

Even if you handle your own IRS audit, be sure to seek out a tax firm that specializes in dealing with tax audits also in the IRS Appeal process.

We totally love getting to share the good news of a favorable result in an IRS case. But some cases allow us the privilege of confirming that we are doing what we were meant to do.

Such was this case, a fairly recent one.

This involved a trucking company here in the Atlanta area that owed over a million dollars to the IRS in taxes, penalties, and interest.

This had been a fairly profitable company, running about 20 trucks and grossing about $2.5 million a year for a few years. They were happy just to have survived the recession, but their balance owed to the IRS for unpaid payroll taxes was more than this family-owned business could withstand.

This was and still is a dear, dear family, and I will cherish the friendship we have developed.

We put our very best efforts into every IRS case that we agree to take. But we knew early on that this family had already gone to the mat for years on end to take care of their employees, drivers, and customers.

So we wanted to show them the same courtesy.

The company had gotten extremely under water with the IRS, to the point where they owed literally a million bucks to Uncle, including penalties and interest.

With this huge balance, it was no surprise that their case had already been assigned to a Revenue Officer.

In the IRS system, the Revenue Officer has very far-reaching authority and power. But this can be very much a double-edged sword, as you will see shortly.

In a separate case about two years ago, we took a case representing a trucking company owner and his wife in Louisiana that owed over $100,000 in taxes. The Revenue Officer in that case was entirely overbearing, and was doing everything possible to put our client out of business.

Fortunately, we were able to get the case transferred away from the “Wicked Witch of the West”, along with a very pleasant settlement to boot!

Getting back to this case, as it turns out we had had other cases with this Revenue Officer. We recalled that he placed a premium on regular communication with his office.

So we make it a rule to go overboard in calling or faxing him almost every time we sneezed.

But part of what we began communicating was the severe health issues that the husband and wife owners were facing, along with their son, who had previously been one of the company’s back-up drivers.

Early on in this case, I asked the owner wife what amount of monthly payment to the IRS would be manageable for her, at least for the moment, as nothing more than a gesture of good faith. She could live with $1,500 a month.

Now, mind you, settling a delinquent tax balance with the IRS is definitely not the kind of thing where they ask you, “What would you like to pay each month?”

Especially not with a balance of over a million bucks, and most definitely not when the balance is for delinquent payroll taxes.

The IRS takes an extremely dim view of unpaid payroll taxes.

If a business already owes, say, $150,000 or more in payroll taxes, and is still not paying—or not able to pay—the current payroll taxes, thus the balance is continuing to grow, this practice is known within the IRS as pyramiding.

The IRS will shut down a business faster than you can say, “Danger, Will Robinson!” for continuing this practice.

Withheld payroll taxes are, in effect, the IRS’ money, because all of the employees from whom it was withheld will be receiving a W-2 showing the amount of Federal Withholding, along with, of course, Social Security and Medicare.

So our very first order of business was to get them current for at least a couple of quarters, even if they could pay nothing towards the arrearage of a million dollars and some change.

We created and discussed with the trucking company owners a game plan for getting into compliance for two consecutive quarters, a six month period.

And again, going back to our knowledge of this particular revenue officer, we even called him and told him our plan and told him we would even send him something in writing that would lay out our proposed steps in numerical order.

I even mentioned to him that we would be helping the company with a plan towards their quarterly payroll, which, in time, would help them reduce the quarterly payroll taxes that they had to pay in. In this case, that simply meant that we would help our trucking client to take the appropriate steps towards converting several drivers from being company drivers to owner-operators, compensated on a 1099 rather than a W-2.

So over the next several months, we began giving him updates as to the family’s health issues as well as the effect on the economy of their business.

All while making absolutely certain that the company kept current on their payroll taxes for current quarters.

Over this period of time, we showed a picture that if the company stayed current with their taxes and also paid the current medical bills they would have about $250 a month left over to go towards their million dollar arrearage.

Eventually, I sent updated financial information to the revenue officer that showed the family was “in the red” on an average monthly basis. Even with that information, I requested an Installment Agreement of $150 per month.

We waited…and waited…and waited some more.

After getting no response for almost three weeks, we used a special process for practitioners where we are able to see online what is going on with the business or individual taxpayer account.

The online transcript showed that the revenue officer had declared our clients’ IRS account as “Currently Not Collectible”. This means that the Service will not require payments towards the prior balance for as much as three years.

Eventually, the revenue officer informed us of this action and said he would simply renew the “Not Collectible” deputation whenever it came up for review as long as the business owners stayed current.

This, their million dollar balance will eventually expire—in about six years in this particular case. And the liability will “fall off” entirely.

One of our most successful cases ever, and it couldn’t have come at a better time for a very deserving family.