Thursday 11 April 2013

Capital Gains Tax

By Dan Henn


It's tax season and folks are pondering various types of discounts starting from the interest paid on loans to credits for property taxes. What you may not know nevertheless , is that selling your house may also help cut your taxes.

People learn about capital gains taxes from real-estate sales. What they don't realize is that you can profit from the sale of a first residence to the tune of $250,000 (single filing) or $500,000 if your married and file jointly. Property consultants should be training sellers about this since it relieves a big worry.

This option came about thanks to the Taxpayer Relief act (1997). Part of this law lightened the capital gains tax, granting relief to literally millions of home sellers. The exclusion sums noted previously are pre-sale, and it makes it way easier to sell a place, while nicely decreasing mounds of bureaucracy that used to accompany Capital Gains reporting.

If you were blind to the Taxpayer Relief act and slipped back on the old techniques of handling Capital Gains - you have got no concerns. If you sold your house after 1997, the law still applies to you are you able to can claim the exemption. The ensuing funds can be used in any manner you deem acceptable, while before it was necessary to apply them to the purchase of another residence.

If you are someone that moves quite a lot , the new law will not obstruct your use of the sales exemption whether or not you sell and buy 20 houses. You can keep on making tax-free profit on each sale provided it's under the exemption limits.

Here are a few rules to the Capital Gains Tax exemption that you need to recollect. You cannot take part in 'flipping ' homes. The single time the relief act is applicable to a home sale is when it is your primary residence - meaning you live there. You do not get a freedom from investment property unless you transform it into your primary residence and live there for no less than 2 years. For people that spend part of the year in a second home, you can still aggregate the time you live in the house that you're meaning to sell. That 2 year period can happen any time during the five years before the house went on sale.

One or two other tiny technicalities: to enjoy the advantages of the Relief act, there has to be a two year period between house sales. Additionally , as a couple it's not mandatory for both folk to have lived in the house for 2 years. For instance, if Sally marries Harry who already owns a home that he's lived in for a year, so a year from now he could sell the home and qualify for the exclusion. The only limit to this, again, is that neither Sally nor Harry used the exemption in the last two years.

Traversing the waters of Capital Gains taxes can get a little muddy. When you find yourself uncertain as to the simple way to proceed, contact a tax expert who knows the legal issues and will help you manage your house sale more successfully.




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