Courtesy of Julian Block

Here’s a cozy household of three: Just Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and the faux friendly tax man. Fact is, whether Brad, Angelina, or anyone else is hooking up, breaking up, or something in between, the stuff of their relationship is grist for the IRS mill.

Fortunately, help has arrived from renowned tax attorney Julian Block. His Marriage and Divorce: Savvy Ways for Persons Marrying, Married or Divorcing to Trim Their Taxes to the Legal Minimum shows everyone, whether single, married, divorced, or living together, how to save taxes for this year and even gain a head start for later years. The expanded edition for 2010 is an indispensable reference that offers clear, concise, uncomplicated, and immediately useful advice for all stages of the relationship and throughout the year, not just when Form 1040 time rolls around.

The lead-off section is “Your Questions/Julian Block’s Answers.” Using the question-and-answer format, Mr. Block makes many difficult problems simpler by presenting the questions in much the same order in which his clients would ask them. He also answers questions people never think to ask or ask after it’s too late.

Persons planning to get hitched need answers to questions like these: “What are we supposed to do about withholding from our paychecks?” “Does the IRS require a woman to pay taxes on engagement gifts if she breaks the engagement?” Married couples want to know: “Should we file joint returns or separate returns? Suppose we file jointly to save taxes and are later audited. Do I become responsible for my mate’s understatements of income and overstatements of deductions?”

The next section, dealing with marriage, starts with “Marriage or Divorce as a Tax Shelter.” It explains why advancing or postponing the date of a marriage or divorce—by merely a single day at year's end—can cost, or save, many tax dollars. Despite recent law changes, the so-called marriage penalty still can cause affluent dual-income couples to lose more to taxes than they would as singles. Does the much-maligned penalty always make marriage a tax trap? Actually, the penalty morphs into a bonus when one spouse earns the entire income or lots more than the other.

“Marriages of Mass Distraction: Tax Traps for Same-Sex Couples” considers the hot-button issue of same-sex marriages. Mr. Block analyzes legislation that bars joint filing of federal returns by same-sex couples. Many of them will run afoul of the marriage penalty, should they be allowed to file jointly, the same as opposite-sex couples.

“Having an Affair Can Be Taxing” reviews court decisions on whether the IRS is entitled to its share of sizable amounts of property received by women—usually, shapely, but not always single—from close acquaintances who were not their husbands. Other noteworthy disputes read like scripts from Woody Allen movies. One required a judge to decide whether a husband’s otherwise nondeductible legal fees for his divorce should be allowable as medical expenses because his health immediately improved after divorcing on his shrink’s orders. Another resolved whether a spurned lover can take a bad debt deduction for the cost of an unreturned engagement ring.

There is a section just for couples who plan to divorce. It provides splitting spouses with answers to their questions about the surprisingly complex rules for who gets to claim dependency exemptions for the children, home sales and other property transfers, and deductibility of divorce-related legal fees.

"Unearthing Hubby's Hidden Assets" deals with an important topic seldom covered by the media. It reveals how still-marrieds and ex-spouses can use information on their joint returns to track down assets concealed by their present or former mates.

Mr. Block’s consistent experience as a tax attorney and investigator is that many wives compelled to litigate their divorces, and already-divorced wives who seek to recover overdue payments of alimony or child support, are clueless about the wealth of no- or low-cost financial data that they can glean from 1040 forms and accompanying schedules.

He cites the example of a woman whose divorce proceedings had become horrendously prolonged and contentious. So some 10 years ago, she shelled out $15,000 just to have a detective tail her spouse, a medical professional and a serial philanderer, to a safe deposit box that he had rented in his aunt’s name and which turned out to be crammed with nearly half a million in greenbacks. That $15,000 (today, that amount would be way more) proved to be savvy spending because the wife’s unearthing of the concealed cash caused the husband to agree to a more favorable divorce settlement. Hubby wisely wanted to avoid court testimony about payments in cash received from patients—information about income unreported on tax returns that the judge might routinely have passed on to the IRS.

And there’s so much more in the book on how to benefit from breaks and dodge dangers. To order a copy of Marriage and Divorce, visit JulianBlockTaxExpert.com.