How To Reduce Taxes From Your Rentals For Non-Real Estate Professionals

Tax Tuesday is here again. Toby Mathis hosts, with special guest Eliot Thomas from Anderson Advisors, here to help answer your questions.

On today’s episode, Eliot has grabbed a bunch of great questions for us to answer. Toby and Eliot will talk about the Augusta rule, easy tax deductions against W-2 income, cost segregation, bonus depreciation, real estate professional status, active participation, S-Corp, C-Corp and partnership advantages.  Online, we have Ander, Patti, Ian, Dana, Matthew, Jared, Piao, Tanya, Troy, and Dutch, a multitude of CPAs, by the way, in our Q&A. If you ask questions in Q&A, you're going to get really, really smart people answering that question. Toby sends out a a huge public thank you to all these talented people.

If you have a tax-related question for us, submit it to taxtuesday@andersonadvisors.

Highlights/Topics:

• "I'm selling a property that was willed to be in 2019. I've been renting this property out since receiving it. It will sell for a profit of over $360,000. Would I pay taxes on the full profit or the difference between value at the time the property was willed or do I pay taxes on the difference between the profit and $250,000?” - You inherited it in 2019. It says you've immediately started renting it out, so it's an investment property. It's not going to qualify for the capital gain exclusion of living in our primary residence for two of the last five years.
• "What are some simple easy things that can be done to reduce taxable income and reduce taxes paid on each of my paychecks?” Donate to charity in large chunks, HSA, IRAs, etc.
• "Options for tax write-off, reducing tax burden if I have rental real estate, but I am not a full-time real estate professional. Both my wife and I have W-2 jobs that we don't foresee leaving anytime soon to become real estate investors." - See the answer to previous question, and also you want to look at if your AGI (adjusted gross income) is a little bit lower, maybe under $100,000, you can take up to $25,000 of the passive losses.
• "Augusta Rule: We have put our properties in a Wyoming entity and the Texas series LLC in late December of 2022, but have not started using it yet. Can we use the Augusta Rule in 2022 throughout the year for our business purposes, even though we've not completed setting up the business?" Augusta Rule, that's just what we call 280A most often. That's the ability to rent out your home. Dwelling is the proper term for no more than 14 days a calendar year. The income you receive, you don't have to pay tax on.
• “When a rehab required property acquired for long-term hold, when is the right time to do the cost segregation study? Before the rehab or after?" - Once you purchase a property or after the rehab, you could do it either way. If you don't do what's called a cost seg study, the IRS will let you treat it all as 27½ years…
• "Anderson created my S-corp entity in November of 2022. I've only had expenses for the year-end 2022, but no income or property purchases yet. What am I required to file for my S-corp regarding the expenses I've incurred?" – You're going to have to file your tax return for that S-corp. It is what we call an informational return. In other words, your S-corp doesn't pay any tax, but it does have a tax return called an 1120-S.
• "I created my two LLCs both with real estate assets with rental income in 2022. Also, I created a holding company that holds both the LLCs. I have a W-2 job. When do I file the tax for the holding company? Is it one tax filing that combines all the LLCs and my W-2?” - We recommend that the holding company becomes a partnership. Also, it helps from a lending standpoint. Typically, lenders are able to lend more to you being that the property is in a partnership than if it had been in a direct disregarded LLC.
• "Curious to hear an open discussion about one and how to utilize section 179 and/or bonus depreciation for vehicles." - Why not just do mileage reimbursement? It's like 65.5¢ a mile right now. It's your car. You can use non-commercial insurance. It could just be your car that you use. If you let employees use it, that goes out the window.
• "What are the steps to take in order to withdraw money from a C-corp account? Are there any tax consequences involved?" - With a C-corporation, the first thing I'd like to look at are the reimbursements…
• "How to save taxes as S-corp, and is it better to do an STD deduction?" - The S-corp has a lot of advantages to it to save on taxes. Standard deduction is huge for most people. But “it depends”.
• "Can you please touch upon what depreciation recapture is and how it impacts taxes?" - Basically, when you have an asset that's been used in a trade or business, we don't deduct the full cost of it immediately. We take a little bit over time, we call it depreciation. Then when you resell, you might have what's called depreciation recapture on that depreciation that you took over the years. It does depend on what kind of asset it is.
• "I work from my home office. How do I claim this?" - If you have a sole proprietorship, you can take a deduction for basically the percentage square use of that house, that’s an easy way to describe it. If you could get reimbursed, then it could be 20% of your house. By the way, that includes mortgage interest, property taxes. If you have somebody coming in cleaning your house, your utilities.
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Resources:

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