BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 890: 100% Bonus Depreciation Coming Back? (Do NOT File…Yet) w/Brandon Hall

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

The biggest real estate tax deduction is coming back. That’s right—100% bonus depreciation is almost cleared for a triumphant return as the House pushed a new tax bill to the Senate, one that incl...udes some massive tax deduction potential for real estate investors and everyday Americans alike. So, why is this SUCH a big deal? We’ve got Brandon Hall, CPA, on to break down why bonus depreciation could save you tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars. Everyone knows that real estate boasts some of the best tax benefits of any investment in the nation. But, the one tax benefit to rule them all is almost always depreciation. This tax write-off lets you expense a portion of your property every year and can turn your real-life gain into a paper loss, so you keep your cash flow while avoiding taxes. But bonus depreciation is like regular depreciation on steroids. And the tax benefits can be massive. So, how do you take advantage of this huge tax write-off? What do you need to know BEFORE you take it? And should you hold off on filing before this new bill passes? We’ve got answers to all that and much more in this episode, so stick around! In This Episode We Cover: Four of the hottest housing markets in 2024 that we’d flip houses or long-term invest in The high-priced coastal market that we love…but wouldn’t buy rentals in A snowy northeast market that has low prices and big rent-by-the-room potential  A sleeper city with a big price tag but solid investing benefits The not-so-sexy market that made the number-one spot and surprised us all Unemployment rates, home prices, average rents, and top metrics you MUST check before investing And So Much More! Links from the Show Find an Agent Find a Lender BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Agent BiggerPockets Bootcamps Join BiggerPockets for FREE On The Market Join the Future of Real Estate Investing with Fundrise Connect with Other Investors in the “On The Market” Forums Subscribe to The “On The Market” YouTube Channel Dave's BiggerPockets Profile Dave's Instagram Henry's BiggerPockets Profile Henry's Instagram James' BiggerPockets Profile James' Instagram Kathy's BiggerPockets Profile Kathy's Instagram BiggerPockets' Instagram What Is Bonus Depreciation And How Does It Work? What is Rental Property Depreciation & How to Calculate It The Biggest Real Estate Tax Loophole You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of w/Brandon Hall Connect with Brandon: Brandon's BiggerPockets Profile Brandon's LinkedIn Brandon's Website Brandon's X/Twitter Click here to listen to the full episode: https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-890 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email advertise@biggerpockets.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to the Bigger Pockets Podcast Network. My name's Dave Meyer. I'll be your host today for this crossover event. This show will be airing both on the Bigger Pockets real estate feed, as well as the on-the-market feed because we have breaking news that's super exciting and interesting for real estate investors. And to help me discuss this, my good friend Henry Washington is here with me today. Henry, how's it going, man? Hey, man, so good to be here. This is a good to be here. this is the ultimate asking for a friend episode. I know where Henry's going with this because we obviously know what the show is about, and it's about taxes.
Starting point is 00:00:40 And sometimes I admit, I don't always know what's going on with taxes, even as it relates to real estate investing. Henry, if you were to rate yourself like one to ten, how well you understand taxes as it pertains to real estate, what would you rate yourself? I think I'm a solid two. Okay. Okay. I was doing this exercise myself. I was like, I think I'm a three. And my goal for this year is to become a five. And I think if you get to be a five, you're probably in a pretty good shape. And that's what we're hopefully going to be doing with this episode. I think by the end, you and I, that's our goal here today. And everyone listening to get ourselves to a five out of ten with real estate taxes. Because as you probably know, if you're listening to this show, real estate. obviously offers cash flow, appreciation, loan pay down, all these great things. But tax benefits are one of the most important pieces of the return puzzle for real estate investors. And there's been some really interesting news about the tax law as it pertains to real estate over the last couple of weeks. So today we are bringing on Brandon Hall.
Starting point is 00:01:51 He is a CPA, certified professional accountant. And he focuses entirely on working with real estate investors. and he's going to be joining us today to break down the proposed new law. So without any further ado, all of you listening, me and Henry, we're going to collectively improve our tax knowledge today with Brandon Hall. Brandon Hall, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for being here. Thanks, Dave.
Starting point is 00:02:16 Appreciate you having me on. You are always so reliable. Whenever some news comes out about taxes and I just don't understand them, you are always there to help us make sense of what's going on and what it means for us real estate investors. So let's just dig into the biggest headline of recent tax news, which is about bonus depreciation. Now, before we've gone into the news element of it, can you just explain to everyone what depreciation is and what bonus depreciation is? And maybe just for a little bonus, why real estate investors care so much about it.
Starting point is 00:02:50 Yeah, sure. So depreciation is a – actually, I'm going to back up before I explain this. I appreciate that compliment. Thank you very much. Like that I'm very reliable. But I have to give credit to my team because these guys are like, I've been able to build my firm to a point where I, where I've got really smart people working out my firm now.
Starting point is 00:03:09 And these guys are all over this bill. So thank you, but credit goes out to them. All right. Depreciation. Depreciation is a non-cash expense. So when I buy a property, I have to allocate some of the purchase price to land and some in the remainder to the building value. I can't depreciate land because land does not deteriorate over time, right?
Starting point is 00:03:30 Dirt does not fall apart. But my building literally falls apart. And when investors are first learning about depreciation, they get confused because they're like, well, real estate should appreciate, right? The value of the property does appreciate, but it is also true that the roof is falling apart. The windows are falling apart. Everything inside that property is falling apart over time, just wear and tear.
Starting point is 00:03:52 So depreciation is an expense that you get to claim. on your tax returns every single year in effort to track that wear and tear. It's an expense that I don't have to pay for every single year. The calculation is purchase price allocated to building, whatever that number is divided by 27 and a half years. That's my annual expense that I get to claim on my tax returns. Whether I paid cash for the property, financed it 100% or somewhere in between. So depreciation is just this nice shelter. It's a cash flow shelter because I could have positive cash flow, but then after my depreciation expense comes into play, which again, I didn't pay for because I paid for it all up front, I could tell the IRS that I lost money, right?
Starting point is 00:04:35 My depreciation expense could cover my net operating income from the property. So it's nice from that perspective because I get essentially tax deferred cash flow from my rental real estate investing. Bonus depreciation is like depreciation on steroids. So bonus depreciation enables me to write off a lot more in the year that I acquire a property and place it into service. And when we're talking about residential real estate, like a single family home, what you would do is something called a cost segregation study, which is the practice of going into a single family home or a multifamily home or any piece of real estate and saying, okay, the building has all of these things that make up the building, right? It's not just if I buy a property for 500K and the
Starting point is 00:05:22 building values 400K and land is 100K, you know, if I don't do a cost segregation study, it's 400K divided by 27 and a half years. But a cost segregation study is going to say, but there's things in that 400K that are not going to last 27.5 years. So let's identify those components. Let's assign a better, more accurate, useful life to those components. And if that, if the useful life is less than 20 years after we do that assignment, then I can immediately expense them with bonus depreciation.
Starting point is 00:05:56 So when you're buying single family homes, when you're buying multifamily homes, you can run cost segregation studies and you can write off a large portion, anywhere between like 15 to 30 percent of the purchase price in the first year of ownership. So bonus depreciation enables you to claw back a lot of that purchase price in the first year as a tax deduction. And bonus depreciation has been phasing out 2020. three, it was 80%, 2024, it's 60%. But 2022 and prior, thanks to the 2017 tax cuts and jobs act, it was 100%. Right. So as it phases out, this whole, I can write off 15 to 30% of my purchase price starts to actually get smaller and smaller. It goes to 12 to 28% and then 10 to 25% and
Starting point is 00:06:43 then so on and so on until it's a much smaller percentage. So that's why everybody's talking about bonus depreciation right now because we've got a bill that just passed the house. that's going to retroactively make bonus depreciation 100% in 2023. Got it. Thank you so much for that explanation. Really appreciate that. Before we talk about the news and whether this is going to pass, I just want to dig into this bonus depreciation because it's super important for people.
Starting point is 00:07:10 When you say 15 to 30%, and there are certain things that can be written off in the first years, what are those things? Yeah, so it's going to be, so if I go into a $500,000, acquisition. Let's call it a single family home. We're going to allocate, call it 400K to the building, 100K goes to land. And then in that $400,000, the cost segregation study is going to pull out components that can be written off over five, seven, and 15 years. So five, seven year components are my personal property components. Think like appliances, furniture and fixtures, carpeting, things that can be easily pulled up and moved to another rental without causing damage,
Starting point is 00:07:53 right? So it's not going to be structural. I can't go and like rip out my plumbing and put that into the next rental. So that doesn't get a five year life. That's going to get a 27 and a half year life. But the cost segregation study is going to identify all those components that we can easily pull off the walls, pull up from the floors, pull out of the house and move to the next rental without damaging that. That's essentially what that personal property is. The 15 year components, are going to be land improvement. So if I have parking pads or parking lots or signage or something like that on my multifamily properties, that's where that 15 year life is really going to come into play.
Starting point is 00:08:27 So the cost segregation study is looking at those types of things and saying, okay, of the 400K building value that we started with, $100,000 of it is five-year property and 15-year property. The remaining 300K is still depreciated over 27 and a half years, but now we get $100,000 first year deduction. So I do think that was probably the best explanation I've ever heard for how bonus depreciation works. I appreciate that. So thank you for that.
Starting point is 00:08:55 We've got a lot more to cover about bonus depreciation and a proposed law that is making its way through Congress as we speak. We will be right back after this quick break. Running your real estate business doesn't have to feel like juggling five different tools, and the tools are blades, or flaming torches. With ReSimple, you can pull motivated seller lists, skip trace them instantly, for free, and reach out with calls or texts, all from one streamlined platform. The real magic? AI agents that answer inbound calls, follow up with prospects,
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Starting point is 00:11:18 We're here with Brandon Hall discussing bonus depreciation and what that actually means for real estate investors. While we're just on the topic of still discussing what it is and how it all works, I think what a lot of people tend to want to understand too is like what's the long-term implications of bonus depreciation? If I take all this bonus depreciation on the front side, is there something I need to watch out for after 27, 27 and a half years. What happens if I sell that property before 27 and a half years? Like what what what what what's the long term picture with bonus depreciation? That is a great question and I wish more people asked that question and talked about it openly. Um, so when you take depreciation, whether it's bonus depreciation or just regular straight line
Starting point is 00:12:00 depreciation, every time that you claim depreciation every single year, what you're doing is you're actually lowering the adjusted basis in your property. So if I have this 500, thousand dollar property and I take depreciation of expense of five thousand dollars now my adjusted basis is four ninety five all right so if I sell it for five hundred and one thousand dollars actually let's play it backwards because this is what's happening I think with a lot of people with short-term rentals all right so let me just give you like a more realistic example you buy a five hundred thousand dollar property in the smokies you run the cost seg it comes with a bunch of furniture and fixtures and everything so you're able to immediately deduct a hundred thousand dollars thanks to
Starting point is 00:12:41 depreciation. So you bought it for 500, you're immediately deducting 100k. Your adjusted basis is now 400,000. You bought this thing peak of the market late 2020, early 2021. Now you're realizing it's a lot harder to run a short-term rental than I thought it was because it was super easy back then when everybody had all that cash to spend and everybody was staying home and like cooped up, right? They wanted to go out and do something. But now you kind of have to, you kind of have to actually run a short-term rental in order to maximize the profit. So now you're looking at it. You're like, I don't want to put in the work. And this isn't performing at the level that I want it to, so I'm going to go ahead and sell it.
Starting point is 00:13:17 You put it on market for 520. Nobody's buying it at 520. Your best offer is 470. All right. So you bought it for 500. Now you've taken this offer at 470. In your mind, you've lost $30,000, right? That's what most people think.
Starting point is 00:13:32 I lost $30,000 on this deal, which is true. You did actually lose $30K. But in the tax world, because you bought it for $500 and took bonus. depreciation of 100, your adjusted basis is 400. And if you sell it for 470, you have a $70,000 taxable gain. So even though you lost money, you have to tell the IRS you had a taxable gain. That is called depreciation recapture because all of that gain comes from depreciation. It doesn't come from market appreciation. That's depreciation recapture. And from bonus depreciation, if your recapture is from bonus depreciation, then you're paying taxes at your ordinary rate, not the long-term capital gain
Starting point is 00:14:14 rate. So it's very expensive and sometimes surprises people on the back end. So whenever you're taking the depreciation up front, what we try to advise people is don't go buy toys with this. This is a loan, right? Like every once in a while you get somebody that goes and buys one of those Lamborghini Euris or something. And it's just like, dude, you need to invest this. Right. This is either going into equities or you're going to lend or it's going to be another property because you've got to grow this capital because at some point you're going to have to give it back to the IRS. Brandon, you cannot be a self-reputable Instagram real estate short-term rental investor who does
Starting point is 00:14:58 not, A, own a property in the Smokies and B, use the money to go buy a Lamborghini Uris. Like, this is not being like we, I have to do this for my business. Well, Henry, you know if you buy a G-wagon, it's a tax deal according to Instagram. It's a free G-wagon according to Instagram. Yes. Just for everyone listening, there's this common belief that if you buy a property, I think it's over 6,000 pounds, you can deduct it.
Starting point is 00:15:25 And people feel like it's all of a sudden a good financial decision to buy an incredibly expensive car. And it's a little bit more complicated than that, to say the least. Yeah. I mean, those rules exist for like the business. people that are, you know, it's construction equipment, right? It's like trucks, like construction trucks. And, and, you know, if you're a business owner and you're going to retain this vehicle for a long time, then go for it. But what happens is we get to December 15th and somebody
Starting point is 00:15:51 calls up their accountant frantically, what do I do? And so, buy a vehicle. Okay, I'm going to go buy the biggest, the most expensive I can't, G-Wagon, you go buy that. And then two years later, your business has shifted. You don't really need the vehicle anymore, but you can't offload it because you're going to have a big taxable gain. You've got this depreciation hit. actual depreciation that you've lost money. So there's a lot more that goes into it than simply, oh, I get a big tax refund. Actually, one of the things that I've encountered many times in my career is that a lot of the benefits to real estate investors in terms of taxes only exist for quote unquote real estate professionals. And when I say real estate professionals,
Starting point is 00:16:29 Brandon could probably give us a better definition. But I don't just mean like I, Dave, talk about real estate as a job. There is a very specific IRS definition. of what a real estate professional is and what it isn't, and I am not one. And so I'm curious about the bonus depreciation. Does this benefit only people who are real estate professionals, or does this also apply to people who work full time in some other industry? Yeah, both. So first, absolutely, if you are a real estate professional or if your spouse is a real estate professional, so you can be working full time in a different. industry, a non-real estate industry, but if your spouse is a real estate professional and you're
Starting point is 00:17:11 filing a married filing joint tax return, then we think of it as the entire tax return as a real estate professional return. So yeah, so if that's the case, then it's wide open to you, right? You can acquire property, place in service, bonus depreciate it, and you can use the tax losses to offset the W-2 spouse's income. So that's certainly an option. Now, real estate professional status, you have to spend 750 hours working in a real property trader business and you have to spend more time working in the real property trader business or businesses than you do anywhere else. So if you're working a full-time W-2 job, you're out. We get a lot of questions from physicians all the time. Like, well, if I'm 10 days on and 10 days off, does that count?
Starting point is 00:17:56 Well, no, because you're still working 2,000 hours for the year. And you have to spend an additional 2001 hours in real estate, more time in real estate than you do at your day job. And even if you could do that, I'm an optimist. When I was starting my firm, I was working 80 to 100 hour weeks for a really long time. So I get it. You could certainly do the work, but you're never going to convince the IRS or the tax court that you did it. So if you're working full time, you can't qualify as a real estate professional. But if you are working full time, there is a workaround. You can invest in short-term rentals. If the average period of customer use is seven days or less, then it's technically not a rental activity. Real estate professional status only applies to rental activities. So a short-term
Starting point is 00:18:37 rental is a workaround to that. I think we actually recorded, last time I was on, we recorded the whole episode on that. So I'm not going to go into all the details there. But if you can do one of those two things, if I can be a real estate professional or if I can buy short-term rentals and qualify for that work-around, then the bonus depreciation is super helpful. However, it doesn't mean that it's not helpful for other people. Like I bought 10 duplexes with, my parents and was we formed a partnership. We went and bought these 10 duplexes and we cost seg that. And so I've got huge passive losses sitting on my returns that are just sitting there. So so doesn't really help me because I'm not a real estate professional. Neither is my
Starting point is 00:19:16 wife. But now I have this padding of suspended losses and I can go sell my three unit that I bought in 2015 that has 200k gain built into it if I so choose to do that. So there are benefits to doing a cost-sex study, even if you can't necessarily capture all the losses today, if you have passive income from other sources or if you have a passive gain from sale from other sources, you can use losses from cost-leg studies to offset them. Okay, so I think I understand. So thank you for that explanation. And please, if you're interested in this, look up what a real estate professional is in the eyes of the tax code. It is super helpful to you to know one way or another, you are or you're not. But so what it sounds like, though, Brandon, is that you can take a do a
Starting point is 00:20:05 cost seg, get your bonus depreciation on let's call it property A. And even if you go to sell property B and you have a taxable gain there, you can use the cost seg from property A, even if you're not a tax professional because they're both passive losses. Or they're both passive income, I should say. Yes. Is that right? Yes. Correct. Yep. Cool. Thank you for letting me know that. Even if you're not a professional. Even if you're not a real estate professional. So passive income always can be offset by passive losses. And to further that, too, it doesn't even have to be a real estate passive activity, right? Like I could invest 100K into a hair salon. This is the example I always used because I really want my local hair salon to call me up and say, we need 100K. They're great. But anyway, I can invest 100K in this local hair salon and they could use that capital as expansion capital. And I could get a share of the profits every single year as a result of my investment. Now, I'm not doing anything. I'm not going to manage it. I'm not going to be part of voting or anything. I just a capital guy, right? So let's say that they pass me $10,000 bucks in profits. That is passive income, even though it's not from a real estate source. That's still passive income. And then I could go and use my real estate depreciate it, bonus depreciate it, to offset the 10K coming from my business or from that business activity because passive loss is offset passive income. And this is something that accountants mess up a lot, especially if they're if they don't have a large real estate book, like, like book of clients or if they're new to the game.
Starting point is 00:21:35 But it's absolutely something that can be done if you really want to be a nerd and dig into section 469. Okay. So now that we've talked about what depreciation is, we're going to get into the logistics of this law right after this quick break. What if your CRM actually did the hard work for you? I know, crazy. ReSimply lets you pull seller lists, skip trace them at no cost, and contact your leads by caller text without bouncing between apps. Then it's AI agents takeover, answering calls, following up automatically, even grading your conversations so you can focus on the deals that matter. Everything's under one roof designed to simplify your day and scale your business. Start your free trial today and lock in 50% off your first month at reSimple.com slash bigger pockets. That's R-E-S-I-M-P-L-I dot com slash bigger pockets. The rise of the tech savvy investors here. You don't need a huge team or tons of overhead to manage rental properties. Just the right tool. So, I want to tell you about how I use rent-ready to get ahead.
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Starting point is 00:25:46 Okay, so that was hopefully a ton of great and helpful information for everybody. I'm sitting here learning as we're listening and taking notes myself. So let's kind of. to get back to the proposed law. So what else is in this proposal and what is the likelihood or time frame that this may actually pass because it's not in play yet? Yeah. So the bill, as of this recording, the bill just passed the house and it's going to go to the Senate next for markup and
Starting point is 00:26:19 debate. There are varying thoughts on when this bill will actually pass, but it is support. by the Senate and also supported by the White House. It is a very popular bill. So I think that it will ultimately get through everything. The question is just when. The Senate recess is I believe on February 12th. And there are now reports this morning, this is February 1st, of Senate aides saying that they don't think that the bill is going to be up for discussion until after that recess, which then puts us into early March for actually getting this thing passed and signed, which is like, you know, a huge question of, well, what do all the real estate investors that have bonus depreciation do? Because bonus depreciation is potentially getting rolled back in 2023 to be 100% versus 80.
Starting point is 00:27:09 So right now we're out or on a big wait and see. A couple of the guys in my firm think that the Senate will actually fast track this. And it might be done before the recess on February 12th. So what's going to have to see? But what's in it? The three major things are the child tax credit is indexed for inflation. So that's a good, that's good news. So that's increasing. The other one is the R&D costs. So R&D costs, I believe it's at the end of 2022. So 2023 was the first year that this hit. It used to be that you could
Starting point is 00:27:40 immediately expense R&D costs, which makes sense for the most part. But now they're requiring a five-year amortization. So what that means is if I am running a technology company, And I've got, you know, a million dollars of cash and I'm spending a million dollars of cash on labor. And so I have zero cash at the end of the day. My $1 million now has to be amortized over five years. So I can only write off $250K of that today. So even though I have zero cash in the bank, I've got to tell the IRS I made $750K this year. Not very good and not ideal, especially now that it's been a lot harder to raise capital from venture funds.
Starting point is 00:28:22 So there's a lot of panic in the tech space, but what's in the bill here is basically rolling all that back, pushing the start date out of that. So in 2023, you'll be able to immediately expense all of your R&D costs, assuming that this bill gets passed. And then the big one for real estate investors is 100% bonus depreciation. So again, as I mentioned, in 2017, the Tax Cous and Jobs Act implemented 100% bonus depreciation. It was 50% bonus depreciation before that. But starting in 2023, that 100% was supposed to drop to 80%. And then this year, 2024, 60%, 2025, 40%, and so on and so forth until it reaches zero. Now this bill is basically delaying that phase out.
Starting point is 00:29:07 So it's going to roll back to 2023, make 2023 100%. And then basically you get 100% for 2023, 2024, and 2025. So it's just kicking the can down the road. We'll deal with it later in 2026. So those are the main three things. And there's some other few things in here, too. You know, if you just got done filing all of your 1099s, this bill proposes increasing the cap from $600 to $1,000, so a little bit less reporting for us. But the interesting thing about this bill is that it's primarily funded from ERC claims, employee retention credit claims. So what was happening during
Starting point is 00:29:45 the pandemic is you could do the PPP loan, you could get the employee retention. credit. And over the past two years, promoters of ERC monies basically came out of the woodwork, built massive businesses really fast. And the IRS is estimating, I forget what percentage, but it's an insanely high percentage. It's like, I'm going to probably not say this right. So don't hold me to it. But it's something like 90%. It's like insane amount of these claims for refunds are fraudulent, are not good. So the IRS is basically stepping up enforcement. and this bill is basically going to pay for itself with recovering those ERC refunds from taxpayers who claim them.
Starting point is 00:30:29 So it's almost like there's a very small portion that is actually funded by it. It's like 300 million or something. But the rest of it is all ERC enforcement, which is pretty interesting. So it's a really small hit to the budget. So with that coupled with it being so popular, people are basically thinking it's going to pass. And I'm sure that they. may fast track this for the people, not because they themselves own real estate. I'm sure it's for the people. Yeah. Yeah, right. Exactly. There is one other thing too. 163J. So if you're, if you're a,
Starting point is 00:31:05 and I forgot to mention this, but if you are a larger investor, you know, Section 163J might be of interest to you. So this bill is helping you out there. And I'm not going to go into that. But that is also being worked on too. So you're going to have a better, a better result with deducting business interest. All right. So it sounds like overall the bill that is getting bipartisan support and looks eventually poised to make its way through the House, the Senate, and get signed into law, is overall a net benefit for real estate investors, which is something I'm sure we all want to hear. Is there anything else in this tax bill, Brandon, that just investors are just Americans should know about. Not really in the, I mean, there's some other things in this tax bill,
Starting point is 00:31:52 but nothing like that is necessarily going to impact your day-to-day life. Great. Although, that's what I wanted to hear. Yeah. There was an issue with getting this bill across the finish line. There were some holdouts on both sides of the aisle in high tax states like California and New York. They wanted to put salt repeal in this bill. So again, back in 2017, the salt limit, state and local tax limit for itemized deductions was set at $10,000. And that crushed people in California and New York, especially in New York City. And so there were, with getting this bill to vote, there were holdouts on both sides of the aisle, both Republican and Democrats that basically wanted to see assault repeal back into play
Starting point is 00:32:41 because they have constituents that are in their minds paying out the nose and taxes and they want to be able to deduct those state and local taxes that you're paying, right, via itemized deductions. They ended up huddling with the House leaders, and then they ended up flipping their votes to yeas. So we were thinking, okay, there's probably some sort of salt bill that is going to be on the table. And then it was confirmed later that there is a salt bill now on the table as well. So a salt bill has been proposed, and it would essentially raise the cap only for married filing joint taxpayers, interestingly, at least as of today, but it would raise the cap from $10,000 to $20,000. So now on your Schedule A, if you're itemizing deductions, your property taxes and your state
Starting point is 00:33:26 income taxes, you've been capped at $10K, but now it might be $20K. So we're watching that bill too. There's the possibility that that one will get combined with the House bill that just passed if they're both in the Senate at the same time. So we'll just have to kind of wait and see on that. And given the timing of this possibly not being signed into law until you said March, right? We all know. Taxes are filed in April. What advice would you have for real estate investors who are working with their CPAs now? Or maybe they're not. Like, what should they be doing to prepare or be ready for this? Yeah. First is give your CPA some grace. You know, man, it's, it's, it's, it's.
Starting point is 00:34:11 Whenever we have these like mid-season swings like this, what happens is there's a whole bunch of like second and third order effects, right? So it's very easy to just say, yeah, hold off while filing your tax return, which is what you should do. If you have bought property and you are using a caustic study or your bonus appreciating improvements or you bought a vehicle and you're going to bonus depreciate it, you should seriously consider holding off on filing your returns because 100% versus 80%. 80% could be a big swing. If you file at 80 and then it's retroactively deployed like this bill passes, then you're going to have to amend and file out 100. So there's there's going to be issues if you bought property, placed it in the service in 2023 and are using 100% or using bonus depreciation. You should hold off filing the return. But the problem is, is that if this bill passes, then all the software companies have to update their software, right?
Starting point is 00:35:12 And so it's not just like, oh, the bill passes, now we can file. No, it's the bill passes, and now we have to wait for all the software companies to update their software to reflect the passage and then we can file. It shouldn't necessarily stop you from going ahead and starting the preparation process, but I would just hold off on actually green lighting that filing until we know what's going happen with this bill. And if it is going to pass, then I would just wait until we are holding off on it with our clients that acquired property and are using bonus depreciation. And just as a point of clarification for people, when you're mentioning companies updating their software,
Starting point is 00:35:48 that I'm assuming you're, you're meeting the companies who do the cost segregation studies. Essentially, it's a piece of software that kind of runs these, this, this cost segregation analysis, right? And so they would need to update that software to reflect 100% instead of 80. So that's a good question. They need to up. their software is yes, they're probably not going to rerun the cost-sex studies. Like, we could, we could extrapolate what 100% looks like as long as we have the Cossack study. What I'm talking about is the actual tax prep software. So we all use enterprise level tax prep software, right? We use CCH. There's Thompson Reuters. There's Drake. There's all these big software companies that enable
Starting point is 00:36:23 professionals to file returns on their behalf. Or even if you're using TurboTax or H&R Block, however you file your returns unless you're handwriting, you're going to have to wait until that software company updates their software to reflect the changes in this bill. And so that's just another set of time, right? And it's, it's even worse for GPs of syndicates and funds. Because not only, you know, not only you have to wait until everything's done, but you also have a bunch of angry investors that want to file their return. So it's, so if you are a GP of a syndicate and fund, you should probably proactively go out and say, yo, we're watching this tax bill. It's going to impact how we file taxes. So just FYI, we might not necessarily get it to you by March 15th.
Starting point is 00:37:08 All right, Brandon, thank you for joining us to share your knowledge and coming on so quickly to help everyone make sense of the changing tax landscape right now, especially in the couple of months leading up to tax season. If you want to learn more about Brandon and his firm, make sure to check out the show notes. We have all the information there. Hopefully, we'll see you again real soon for some more updates on the tax code. Thanks, guys. All right, big thanks to Hall for joining us, Henry, I want to know did we achieve our goal? Did you get up from your two out of ten that you said you were on tax knowledge before the show? You had a three now? I would say I definitely have expanded my knowledge. I think, well, first of all,
Starting point is 00:37:48 Brandon does such a great job of making complex tax topics understandable for everyone. But he did a great job not just explaining what it all is, but talking about some of the implications of what, like, what is the long-term impact of bonus depreciation? And so I learned a lot there. Yeah, same. I think it's really important to know that taxes, like most things in investing, come with trade-offs. There are some short-term benefits. Maybe there's some long-term downsides. And you need to work with a professional and to understand these things to make those decisions for yourself. And hopefully this episode and what Brandon taught us all collectively here today helps us all make better decisions. And one last point of clarification. My knowledge
Starting point is 00:38:30 is probably up to a three now, and that is okay because I'm good at hiring tens. That's so true, exactly, right? All you need to do is be able to understand most of what the people you trust are talking about. And it sounds like you got that a lot down. Absolutely. All right. Thank you all so much for joining us for this episode on the Bigger Pockets Podcast Network. If you learn something useful in this episode that you're going to use in your real estate business or talk to your CPA about, make sure to show us some appreciation, show us some love by giving us a review either on Apple, Spotify, or give us that thumbs up on YouTube. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time. Do you ever notice how
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