Mortgage Tax Benefits: Learn More About Tax Deductions

If you are considering buying a home but are scared of the mortgage loan repayments, you will be pleased to learn that mortgages come with tons of tax benefits, deductions, and exclusions. Buying a home is a lifetime investment that you are unlikely to regret. Not only does it provide psychological comfort and expand your portfolio, but it also grants you a whole bunch of homeowner’s rights. The American government incentivizes homeownership through various federal and state programs. The United States federal tax code provides many benefits aimed at promoting homeownership. This article will walk you through all the tax benefits, deductions, and exclusions you can expect to benefit from once you become a homeowner. To get the best of the commercial mortgage Mississauga market, visit the different companies and request them to walk you through the benefits you can expect to gain.

Mortgage Interest Deduction

When you buy a home through a mortgage, the interest payments you make toward repaying the loan will be deductible from your taxable income. Taxpayers who do not own a home are not offered a corresponding ability to deduct their rental payments from taxable income. Similarly, taxpayers with other kinds of commercial loans for goods and services are not offered the chance to deduct their loan payments from their taxable income.

The current Tax Cuts and Jobs Act offers up to $750,000 deductions on the interest of mortgage debt incurred after 14th December 2017 to buy or improve your first or second home. You are also allowed to deduct any interest paid on home equity up to $100,000.; this applies no matter how you choose to use the borrowed funds. Deducting the interest payments on your mortgage will offer much-needed relief when making your repayments.

Exemption of Capital Gains Tax For-Profits From Home Sales

Generally, all taxpayers must pay capital gains taxes on profits made from the sale of any assets. As a homeowner, the federal government favors you by allowing you to exclude up to $500,000 of capital gains from the sale of your home under certain conditions. 

The first of these is that conditions are that you must have maintained the home sold as your principal residence for more than two of the past five years. Finally, you must not have claimed capital gains exclusion on selling any homes for the past two years. 

Imputed Rent

When you buy a home, the expected return on your investment is living in that house rent-free. Therefore, you will be in a unique position of being a landlord and renter without any rental cash transactions involved. Economists refer to this scenario as imputed rent, and the government excludes it from taxable income. The Office of Tax Analysis in the United States Department of Treasury estimates that imputed rent saved homeowners over $121 billion in the 2019 fiscal year.

Homeowners have a leg up over landlords who are expected to declare their income from rent as part of their taxable income. Renters are also not favored because they cannot deduct any amounts they pay in rent from their taxable income. The American tax code treats homeowners neither as landlords nor tenants; this creates a tax loophole that saves homeowners significant sums of money over the years. 

Property Tax Deductions

After buying your home, you will be required to pay various property taxes to your local government. The federal government allows homeowners to deduct a certain amount of property taxes paid to the local government from their taxable income. These deductions essentially see the federal government pay the same amount of money deducted to your local government. 

The Office of Tax Analysis estimates that property tax deductions saved American homeowners over six billion dollars worth of income in the 2019 fiscal year. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reduced the value of these deductions by placing a cap on the maximum income. The Act stipulated that each taxpayer could only deduct a maximum of $10,000 on state and local taxes. 

General Effect Of Exclusions And Deductions

The federal government has provided all the incentives above to promote homeownership to boost social security. However, these deductions and exclusions are worth more to taxpayers in the higher brackets than the lower ones. 

The difference is mainly because homeowners in higher tax income brackets have higher marginal tax rates. This significant difference means that they have more property taxes and mortgage interests and are more likely to itemize such deductions on their tax returns.