@annoyingdad, I agree. Nobody can question Barfly’s CPA or @Barfly! Please! I definitely didn’t intend for anybody here to do so! It’s her business and only she and the CPA know her family’s particular situation. I’m assuming she’s doing her stuff correctly for her family. I only used her posts to illuminate my own interpretation of the rules. To me, from reading her posts, it seems that the difference between her sons and mine is that her sons earned W-2 wages enough to legally claim that they provided more than half their own support.
No, my support is not as limited as Barfly’s appears to be. I pay for my kids’ cell phones, car insurance, clothes, and health insurance (through my employer – Employee + 2 or more). My kids aren’t home for more than a week or two of the summers either, but they do generally come home for Christmas and Spring Break. They do research, study abroad, or other educational programs during the summer months. (On that note, I think full-time students are considered to live at home even if they don’t come home. Education is a Temporary Absence.)
But even if you consider the things I DO pay for, the things I DON’T pay for amount to much more. My kids pay for their own housing, meals, gasoline, travel, etc, from their taxable scholarship amounts. If it’s legal to look at it that way, then they DO provide more than half their own support.
If one were to add up the costs of housing, meals, and gasoline alone, which they pay, those amounts would far exceed the incremental costs of health insurance, car insurance, cell phones, and clothes that I pay.
It’s just that they’re paying those costs with their taxable scholarships amounts, and I thought, by reading the regulations and following them to the letter, that we weren’t allowed to include taxable scholarships as a means to pay those expenses … and so that they, therefore, were NOT providing more than half of their own support!
It is so ridiculous that a bunch of well-intentioned, well-meaning, smart people cannot figure this out to the point of consensus. That’s a clear indication that our tax laws are way too complicated. Argh.
@twoinanddone, yes, thanks for your post. We are definitely considering amending his return. The big concern is that an amendment would then draw big attention to the points in question. It probably would have just been smarter to file IAW what seems FAIR, not with what was written. But, we’re definitely going to think about amending.