Tax Guru – Ker$tetter Letter

Helping real people win the tax game.

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 690 other subscribers
  • Blog Stats

    • 327,303 hits
  • Posts By Day

    January 2007
    M T W T F S S
    1234567
    891011121314
    15161718192021
    22232425262728
    293031  
  • Subscribe

  • Special Pages

Archive for January 6th, 2007

Tax free sales of rental homes

Posted by taxguru on January 6, 2007

 

Q:

Subject: Tax Question
 
Hi Kerry – 
 
I was wondering if you could help me with a residence tax question.  I currently live in a Primary Residence in MI, and have a condo in AZ that I am renting out.  If I sell the house in MI and move into the condo after the current renters lease is up, and live in the condo for 2 years, can I avoid capital gains?  It is currently a rental property for me.  If not, do you have any idea how I could avoid capital gains on the condo?
 
Thanks,

A:

Ever since the current law regarding residence sales was enacted in May 1997, this has been a very common strategy; to convert rental homes into primary residences and sell them tax free after two years, again and again.  I used to call it the “conversion game.”  Others have called it “serial home selling.”

This strategy is still available today, except in the case of rental homes that had been acquired as replacement property for a 1031 exchange.  As I explained in my blog, you need to have owned the home for at least five years in order to use the Section 121 tax fee exclusion, in addition to meeting the two year residency test.

Most of these issues are explained on my website.

As always, before implementing any tax saving strategy such as you are proposing, you must consult with an experienced tax professional to ensure that you do everything properly and don’t shoot yourself in the foot. 

Good luck.

Kerry Kerstetter

 

 

 

Posted in 1031 | Comments Off on Tax free sales of rental homes

Working With Quicken

Posted by taxguru on January 6, 2007

 

Q-1:

Subject: Quicken
 
I googled a question that I had to do with categorizing multiple business income/expense transactions in the same file without having to make subcategories galore. Your site came up and I want to thank you for your tips that helped me sort out these issues. For some reason I never thought of using classes for that.

A-1:

I’m glad you found that tip useful.  I’m actually amazed at how many people still overlook the ability of Classes in Quicken and QuickBooks to easily handle several different businesses in one data file. 

Good luck.

Kerry Kerstetter


Q-2:

Thanks for your response. I do have one related question.

Because we provide childcare, I need to send a report to each client at the end of the year and have used classes to separate them. If I isolate the different business accounts with classes, the Deposits I record will not appear because the transactions are split in classes for each client (Income:Private Clients/name) under each deposit.  Is it suggested to record deposits in a separate account then record the total deposit again in the business account applied to, or do you know of another way?

Thanks.

A-2:

It shouldn’t be necessary to double enter anything ion order to be able to produce those reports.  I used to print those out with Quicken with no problem.

Unfortunately, it has been so long since I’ve done anything with Quicken files except covert them to QuickBooks that I am too rusty on the detailed steps to be able to explain how to produce your desired reports. 

This also brings up the fact that you would be better off upgrading to QuickBooks for the reasons I laid out in this article a long time ago.  You wouldn’t lose any of your data and it would allow you a number of different ways to produce the detailed client/customer reports you are having problems with in Quicken.

Good luck.  I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help.

Kerry Kerstetter

  

The best book on QuickBooks Premier Editions

 

 

Posted in QB | Comments Off on Working With Quicken

Pelosi plans to stick it to us…

Posted by taxguru on January 6, 2007

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Pelosi plans to stick it to us…