backdoor question - married filing ???

[kenmoremmm]

i'm just reading up on the backdoor roth method (still much to learn). i read through this article (https://thecollegeinvestor.com/11951/ultimate-guide-traditional-ira-roth-ira-contributions/) and about 3/4 of the way down where it talks about backdoor and he gives the example, i started questioning whether it would be beneficial to file married-filing-separately for a backdoor roth. is there no difference once you pencil out the numbers between 'jointly' and 'separately'?

[secondcor521]

With the new tax law things may be different now, but in general MFS is a pretty poor filing option if you can avoid it.  There are a lot of limitations on things with that filing status that are detrimental.

That being said, if you're willing to go through filling out the forms or putting your data into tax software twice, you can always do it both ways and file whichever way works best.