Mortgage interest
If you use the place as a second home—rather than renting it out—interest on the mortgage is deductible within the same limits as the interest on the mortgage on your first home.
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- For tax years prior to 2018, you can write off 100% of the interest you pay on up to $1.1 million of debt secured by your first and second homes and used to acquire or improve the properties. (That's a total of $1.1 million of debt, not $1.1 million on each home.) The rules that apply if you rent out the place are discussed later.
- Beginning in 2018, the limit is reduced to $750,000 of debt secured by your first and second home for binding contracts or loans originated after December 16, 2017.
- For loans prior to this date, the limit is $1 million ($1.1 million without the $100,000 home equity portion).
Property taxes
You can deduct property taxes on your second home, too. In fact, unlike the mortgage interest rule, you can deduct property taxes paid on any number of homes you own. However, beginning in 2018, the total of all state and local taxes deducted, including property taxes, is limited to $10,000 per tax return.
If you rent out the place
Lots of second-home buyers rent out the property part of the year to get others to help pay the bills. Very different tax rules apply depending on the breakdown between personal and rental use.
If you rent the place out for:
- 14 or fewer days during the year, you can pocket the rental income tax-free. Even if you're charging $5,000 a week, the IRS doesn't want to hear about it. The house is considered a personal residence, so you deduct mortgage interest and property taxes under the standard rules for a second home.
- More than 14 days, you must report all rental income. You also get to deduct rental expenses, and that gets complicated because you need to allocate costs between the time the property is used for personal purposes, and the time it is rented.
Consider this example
If you and your family use a beach house for 30 days during the year and it's rented for 120 days, 80% (120 divided by 150) of your mortgage interest and property taxes, insurance premiums, utilities, and other costs would be rental expenses.
- The entire amount you pay a property manager would be deductible, too.
- And you could claim depreciation deductions based on 80% of the value of the house.
- If a house is worth $200,000 (not counting the value of the land) and you're depreciating 80%, a full year's depreciation deduction would be about $5,800.
You can always deduct expenses up to the level of rental income you report. But what if costs exceed what you take in? Whether a loss can shelter other income depends on two things: how much you use the property yourself and how high your income is.
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Your use can be limited
If you personally use the place for:
- More than 14 days, or more than 10% of the number of days it is rented—whichever is more—it is considered a personal residence and the rental loss can't be deducted. (But because it is a personal residence, the interest that doesn't count as a rental expense—20% in our example—can be deducted as a personal expense.)
- Up to 14 days, or 10%, the vacation home is considered a rental property and up to $25,000 in losses might be deductible each year. That's why lots of vacation homeowners hold down leisure use and spend lots of time "maintaining" the property.
Fix-up days don't count as personal use. The tax savings from the loss helps pay for the vacation home. Unfortunately, holding down personal use means you have to forfeit the write-off for the portion of mortgage interest that does not qualify as either a rental or personal-residence expense.
Passive losses
We say such losses might be deductible because real estate losses are considered "passive losses" by the tax law. And passive losses are generally not deductible. But there's an exception that might protect you.
If your Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) is less than $100,000, up to $25,000 of such losses can be deducted each year to offset income such as your salary.
- As income rises between $100,000 and $150,000, however, that $25,000 allowance disappears.
- Passive losses you can't deduct can be stored up and used to offset taxable profit when you ultimately sell the vacation house.
Tax-free profits
Although the rule that allows home sellers to take up to $500,000 of profit tax-free (up to $250,000 if you're unmarried) applies only to a sale of your principal residence, there is a way to extend the break to your second home: make it your principal residence before you sell. That's not as wacky as it might sound. Some retirees, for example, are selling their big family homes and moving full-time into what had been their vacation homes.
- Once you live in that home for two years, part of the $500,000 (or $250,000) of profit can be tax-free.
- Any profit attributable to depreciation while you rented the place, though, would be taxable.
- Depreciation reduces your tax basis in the property and, therefore, increases profit dollar-for-dollar.
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