How to (Legally) Reduce Taxes with Real Estate + Crucial New Trump Tax Plans

Dave:
What’s up everyone? It’s Dave. We are of course, past the new year, which we are just counting down the time to everyone’s least favorite day of the year, April 15th, because of course paying taxes really sucks, but there is actually sort of a silver lining for real estate investors. Then tax season sort of makes me feel grateful to be a real estate investor because owning real estate has a ton of tax advantages. Properties of course, make you money, but they also help you keep more of your cashflow and it can even offset gains from other investments or your ordinary income. It is a lot of paperwork, but let me tell you from some very expensive experience that it is worth thinking about and talking about this stuff because you are almost certain to save more money if you just invest a little bit of time and money into optimizing your tax strategy.
So today on the show, we’re getting ready for tax season with our guest Amanda Han. Amanda is a CPA. She’s also a real estate investor herself, and she specializes in helping other investors reduce their tax burdens as much as possible. In today’s episode, Amanda is going to talk us through the basics that every investor should know before filing their taxes, and she’s even going to share a few more under the radar style tips that only pros really use. Then in the second half of the show, we’re going to get into a question that’s been on my mind and from the questions I get, it’s on a lot of other people’s minds right now. What does the new Trump administration mean for taxes going forward? Are we going to pay less? Are there going to be any changes to the many tax benefits we enjoy as real estate investors? Let’s find out with Amanda Hahn. Amanda Hahn, welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. Thanks for being here.

Amanda:
Yes, I’m so excited to be here with you, Dave.

Dave:
Well, you are a frequent guest and friend of the show, but for anyone who’s new around here, could you just give a brief intro?

Amanda:
Yes. My name is Amanda Hahn. What I tell people is I am a CPA by day and real estate investor by night. So most of you guys, I invest in real estate and my passion is really in helping real estate investors nationwide on how to use real estate to not just build wealth but also save on taxes. So I’m so excited to be here because it’s tax season taxes are top of mind.

Dave:
I am glad you are excited about tax season

Amanda:
Somebody has to be.

Dave:
So let’s just start with what are sort of the big picture things. If anyone is new to this and maybe not as familiar with some of the tax benefits for real estate, what are some of two or three things that you think real estate investors should be thinking about as we head into tax season?

Amanda:
So I think as a real estate investor, especially for those of you who are new to real estate investing, it’s important to understand that once you start investing in real estate, you are actually a business owner in the eyes of the IRS. So what that means is whenever you hear people talk about business, the definition of business also includes real estate, whether it’s rental properties, if you are doing your first bird property or you’re flipping real estate, wholesaling real estate, those are all businesses, which means if you’re involved in those activities, we can start to write off our business expenses against that income, which is kind of different if you just have a W2 job. Maybe historically we were very limited in terms of what we can write off. So it kind of opens up a whole new world about what we can deduct and how we can plan ahead now to make tax time a little bit more fun.

Dave:
Good. I would love to make tax time a little bit more fun and that totally makes sense. Yeah. Just as a business owner, you get to spend money on your business and a lot of that is tax deductible, but there are also additional things that are unique to real estate beyond just being small business. Right. Can you share with us some of the big buckets of tax laws that people should familiarize themselves with?

Amanda:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, one of the benefits of real estate investing is not only do we get to take business deductions. Business deductions are just like we spend money on maybe a BiggerPockets membership. We buy a tax book to learn about real estate investing or memberships we pay or just regular expenses. In addition to that, we also get to take what’s called depreciation, and depreciation is basically a paper write off. We call it a paper write off because you’re not actually losing money, but tax law allows you to write off the purchase price of your building over time. And so when you hear a lot of times when people talk about real estate tax benefits, real estate losses, I think for those people who are newer to real estate, they kind of get alarmed like, why am I losing money? Why do I have tax losses? So it’s really important to understand that when we talk about tax benefits, we’re not saying lose money on the investment. In fact, hopefully we’re getting cashflow and appreciation and making a lot of money, but with tax planning, we’re using things like write-offs and depreciation specific to real estate to then create a loss that in turn helps us to save on taxes.

Dave:
Can you tell us, just give us an example. If you were making say $500 a month in cashflow, right? So you profited about $6,000 in a year from a single rental property, how could depreciation help you shelter some of that from immediate tax?

Amanda:
For sure. I mean, depreciation is just an additional expense that we can write off. So obviously if we’re saying we’re cash flowing $500 a month, that’s after we’ve paid all of our operational expenses. But if you have a property and let’s say your depreciation is going to be $5,000 for the year, well, instead of paying taxes on $6,000 worth of income, we get to write off that 5,000 against it. So maybe our taxable rental income is only a thousand dollars. And so what we love about depreciation is that we get to take that tax write off regardless of what’s actually happening to our properties or what’s happening in the market. So it could have a property where it’s actually appreciating in value. Well, it doesn’t matter because for tax purposes we still get to write it off because that’s the tax law. And also I think too, when you hear people who say like, Hey, I pay so much taxes on my income. Well now as an investor, we get to make more income like rental income without paying a lot of taxes on it, and that’s all of our goals, create more income without working harder, but also creating more income that I don’t have to pay a huge amount of taxes on.

Dave:
And just for everyone to understand, I work pay full regular ordinary income tax on my W2 job here at BiggerPockets. I also get rental income and not just in terms of long-term benefit, but the rental income is literally worth more to me because of depreciation, right? Because I can write off a lot of expenses that basically allow me to defer taxes on that current income, which means it’s worth depending on your tax bracket, somewhere between 20 and 35% more, right? Because you’re not paying tax on your rental income like you are on your W2. It’s just one of the many benefits of real estate tax

Amanda:
For sure, and if you happen to live in a state that has high income tax rates, I live in California, although I have clients nationwide, but I’m in California, and if you’re high income order in California, you’re losing over 50% of income to taxes. And I love what you said, Dave, so it’s like, Hey, if I’m making $6,000 for my job and $6,000 for my rental income, well guess what? On my rentals, I probably get to pocket the whole 6,000 versus on my W2, I don’t know, maybe I get to pocket 4,000, 3000 of it after taxes, and that’s why it’s such a precious bucket of money

Dave:
In California, you would’ve to earn $9,000 in W2 basically if you’re a top earner to get the same thing as $6,000 in rental income. So that’s just one of the great parts of depreciation. And as you said, it’s sort of a misconception for some people. Are there other common myths or misconceptions you hear about real estate tax?

Amanda:
What a lot of people don’t know is that not only can rental losses offset taxes from rental income, but sometimes we can also use it to offset taxes from our W2 income as well, especially if you’re someone who makes under $150,000. If your W2 total income is a hundred thousand dollars and you own one or two rental properties, you can actually use up to $25,000 of your rental losses against your W2 income, and that’s just the tax law. That’s for everybody who invests in real estate.

Dave:
Is that true for married people too? 150 is the limit?

Amanda:
Yes. Unfortunately, it’s a marriage penalty, so normally, again, if your income is under a hundred thousand or between one and one 50, you can generally use up to $25,000 of rental losses to offset that income, and it’s really, really impactful for people in that income range group because if you think about it, if I can make a hundred thousand of W2 income and not pay any income taxes and use all of that money to then reinvest in real estate and kind of rinse and repeat every year, yeah, I can grow my wealth so much faster than paying taxes on the whole thing. But yes, for those who are married or people whose income is over one 50, the laws are a little bit more complex in terms of who can use the losses against. What type of income

Dave:
Are these types of advantages like depreciation and cost segregation studies? Are these things that people can do themselves or do you need a CPA or a real estate specific CPA to be able to figure this out for your own filings?

Amanda:
I’ve seen both. I think the answer to that question depends on the investor’s knowledge when it comes to taxes. I would say that if you’re pretty well versed in tax law, then yeah, it’s okay. Probably okay for you to do your own tax return, especially if it’s pretty simple. You don’t have partners, it’s maybe just you or you and a spouse owning a rental property. It’s not that difficult to do. But if you’re trying to do accelerated depreciation, if you’re taking advantage of some of the more complicated or advanced tax law, then oftentimes it makes sense to have a CPA or an enrolled agent, a professional to help you do the tax filing. Because when we talk about real estate tax benefits, we’re generally not talking about saving $500 or a thousand dollars in taxes. We’re talking about five, 10, 15,000 or more in taxes, and because the tax savings are so significant, if you make a mistake and you’re caught, the penalties and interests are also very significant. So yeah, it’s not that to say you can’t do your own taxes. You certainly could if you’re someone who’s very knowledgeable, but if we’re talking about larger numbers, typically recommend that you go to a professional.

Dave:
That is a very modest answer, and I understand why. You’re not just telling people to go out and hire CPAs. You’re being very kind and encouraging people. I’ll just do it for you. Go hire A CPA. Honestly, it’s so much better. I have tried to do my taxes by myself, and it is humiliating how confusing I felt like it was, and paying for A CPA, not only just peace of mind has been so helpful, but as an investor, it helps you in year and it also just helps you plan for the future in a way that I think is extremely valuable to your overall portfolio strategy.

Amanda:
Falling tax return is kind of the necessary evil where we have to report what we did or didn’t do last year, but when you work with the CPA and you can focus on tax planning, what should we do this coming year to make sure I have the portfolio, the right investment, save on taxes? That’s really the key, right? That’s the value your CPA brings to you.

Dave:
Yes, totally on board. Definitely consider this very strongly, especially if you have more than one rental property. Amanda, we do have to take a quick break, but before we do, I wanted to ask you something as we’re talking about taxes, you’re joining BiggerPockets Momentum, right? You’re coming to our new virtual summit?

Amanda:
Yes, I am. I’m so excited. It’s going to be my first time.

Dave:
Oh, great. What are you, I assume it’s about taxes, but what are you going to be talking about?

Amanda:
Oh man. So fun. Lindy and I were just chitchatting yesterday. We have a lot of cool things planned because I know our audience will be made up of people that do different types of real estate, so we’re going to be covering tax strategies, legal entity structuring strategies

Dave:
For

Amanda:
Long-term investors, midterm, short-term flippers, and maybe also passive investors too. So really excited about that.

Dave:
Awesome. Great. Well, if you want to check out Amanda’s session at Momentum 2025 or any of the other great sessions or mastermind groups that you get with that, go to biggerpockets.com/ 2025 and grab your ticket. We’ll be right back. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. We are here with Amanda Hahn real estate tax expert. So far we’ve talked a little bit about the basics of tax. For those of us who are just getting started in real estate or are not super privy to all the tax benefits that real estate offers, I’d like to move on to talk just quickly about some of the more advanced strategies. Then I really want to ask you about some of the current events and things that might be happening with the new administration, but first, I don’t know if you call ’em hacks or tricks or loopholes, but what are some of the more exciting or less known tax advantages to real estate that you recommend to your clients?

Amanda:
One of the lesser known things about tax and real estate is just our ability to invest in real estate with our retirement money. I think one of the most common questions I get a lot from investors is, I would love to buy more real estate. How do I get money to buy more real estate? Where do I get money to buy real estate? And of course, we always hear about creative financing, seller financing, subject to all those fun things, but why not start with what you already have? I think for most Americans, a lot of our wealth is actually tied up in retirement accounts. If you have a job in the past or you currently have a job, most people have a lot of money in their 4 0 1 Ks or in their IRAs or Roth IRAs, and so when we talk about planning ahead for our next deal, try to fund our next deal, that’s a really great resource to start looking at and who is it good for?
Well, if you’re someone that real estate is sort of your expertise or you have unique insight into real estate and you think that you can do better investing in real estate than the stock market, then why not take your retirement money out of the stock bonds and mutual funds and move it over to real estate assets? Now, I do want to clarify. I don’t mean distributing or liquidating retirement account for real estate because there are some pretty harsh taxes and penalties associated with it. The better or an alternative way to do it is to simply move it from one account into another type of retirement account, but still using retirement account to invest in real estate. Normally those are called self-directed accounts. So like if your money right now, if you have an IRA with Wells Fargo, we’re not liquidating it. We’re just moving it from Wells Fargo to a self-directed custodian, and then from there it invests in real estate to continue to grow tax a further tax free.

Dave:
And can you explain a little bit how that works? Because, so basically you’ve contributed money to an IRA or a 401k through your career. You have some, let’s just call it a hundred thousand dollars. Using your example in Wells Fargo who manages your retirement account, you move it over to a new self-directed custodian. And what tax advantage do you get?

Amanda:
The concept of self-directed investing, really what we’re saying is we have money in the stock market and let’s say it’s growing at 3%, but I know if I move it over to real estate, I’m going to do a burr or just a regular long-term single family rental. I can generate 6% return. Then that is the benefit. I’m generating higher return with the money instead of stock market I’m putting in real estate. When you do it correctly, we do what’s called a rollover, a direct rollover. So that money, let’s say it’s a hundred thousand dollars, let’s say it’s 50,000, that money from Wells Fargo never touches your hands. It goes directly from Wells Fargo to the self-directed custodian. When you move it that way, it’s tax free, penalty free because all I’ve done is change it to another account and once the money is in that account, it goes out and buys real estate. Now, in the future, before you reach retirement agents start taking money out in the next several years, rental income goes back to the retirement, and the benefit of that is it continues to grow tax deferred

Dave:
So

Amanda:
You don’t have to worry about paying taxes on it. Yeah, if you were to sell that property and you wanted to trade up into a duplex or a multifamily, you also don’t have to worry about 10 31 exchange or anything like that at all because it’s always inside the retirement account. So a lot of really great benefits associated.

Dave:
Wait, I just want to understand one thing you said. So if you generate cashflow profit, it goes back into the 401k?

Amanda:
Yes. Yeah. Oh, cool. If you want to continue to have it grow tax deferred or tax free, then it goes back into the 401k. You could say, well, I want to take some of that out personally, I want to use it for personal spending or whatnot. But just keep in mind whatever portion or amount you take out of the retirement account, that is considered a distribution. So you may have to pay taxes or even penalties if you’re not a retirement age yet. But the concept of it is the same right now your 401k is invested in stocks, and so when there’s stock sales and there’s dividend, it goes back into that IR or 401k, the same exact thing when it comes to real

Dave:
Estate. All right. Now I’m sorry I’m digging into this. I got to be honest. I’ve always known this is a good strategy and I’ve just been low on my priority list, but I do like the idea of it. So I just have two other quick questions. One is, do you have to move your whole account to a self-directed or can you sort of split it between two different custodians?

Amanda:
Great question. So we can actually move any part of retirement account over as we wish. So if you just left an employer and there was $500,000 in your 401k, you could say, well, I only want to roll out a hundred thousand into the self-directed, the rest I want to keep in this account, or I want to roll it over to Wells Fargo or Vanguard and do all different types. So it’s always up to you how much or how little you want to move over to a self-directed account. And again, if you do it a direct rollover, it’s going to be tax free and penalty free.

Dave:
Okay, last question, then we’ll move on to what’s going on with some of the policies Trump has proposed. How hard is it to do this? Is it a pain in the butt to open a self-directed account?

Amanda:
It’s actually super simple. We refer to it as a three-step process, open an account. So the first step, believe it or not, is you want to open the account. That means interviewing different self-directed custodians to see who you like. They all do the same thing, but of course, bigger companies, smaller companies, so find the custodian that you like. Step one, open the account with them. Step two, roll the money over. So let’s say I opened mine with you, direct or equity trust, they’re going to have paperwork for you where you can say, Hey, currently my money is at Wells Fargo. Please go over and request that the money be transferred. So that’s it. You don’t even have to do anything. Just fill out the paperwork. They will request the transfers directly once the money is in the self-directed account. Then step three, start shopping. Start shopping for real estate notes, syndications, basically all sorts of real estate or even non-real estate assets and start building wealth.

Dave:
I mean, it sounds like everything in my life with taxes where I built it up in my mind to be a huge pain in the butt and it’s going to be so terrible, and then it’s actually really not that hard,

Amanda:
And I think you’re not alone. People tend to think of tax in general or finance too, even as very complicated, but I think that if you have the right tax advisor or financial advisor or just real estate coach, that’s where their job is to help simplify it. You don’t need to know all the rules about self-directed investing. You just need to know what are the things I need to do, step one, step two, step three, and then I have an advisor or mentor I can on that’s like, Hey, I’m thinking about doing this. Is that okay? Is going to be a problem, and they can help you with all that.

Dave:
Alright, well thank you. This is super helpful. I do want to turn to more of current events and what’s changing because it does seem like there are some big policies that could be enacted in the coming year that could have a real big impact on all Americans, but specifically real estate investors. So President Trump, he’s getting inaugurated. We’re recording this on the 13th next week, and he’s made a lot of comments about different types of tax policies and tax benefits that he’s thinking about. We obviously don’t know which ones are going to get enacted in what order, in what degree, but are there any that you feel confident are going to be enacted right off the bat?

Amanda:
Gosh, I’m a very optimistic person, so I feel pretty confident that most of the things that he actually put in place many years ago will be extended at least temporarily or come back in some form or fashion for real estate investors in our community. Of course, bonus depreciation is the one that’s top of mind for everyone. We started out a hundred percent bonus and now this year in 2025, we have 40% bonus.
Currently it’s scheduled to go to 20% next year and then zero thereafter. So the Trump administration has signaled pretty strongly that they want to bring back a hundred percent bonus depreciation in some form or fashion. We’re really hopeful, keeping fingers crossed, that’s a huge one for real estate investors, especially those who are able to use real estate to offset their business income or W2 income qualified business income is another one. People don’t talk about it as much. It’s less sexy than bonus depreciation, but qualified business income essentially allowed up to 20% of certain types of income to be tax free. So an example might be if you made a hundred dollars of taxable rental income, you only pay taxes on $80 of it, so $20 of it was completely tax free. This is also something that is currently scheduled to sunset or expire as of the end of next year, but we’re hopeful that this will also be reinstated too.

Dave:
Okay, great. So just want to first clarify something. Back in 2017, Trump passed just a kind of sweeping tax reform act called the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that lowered corporate taxes. It lowered individual income taxes and it adjusted a lot of the tax code. When that was enacted in 2017, I think it was set for eight years basically, and so it was already set to expire in 2025. Regardless of what happens, Trump has campaigned on at least extending them. So taking what we have today and continuing that into the future, and you said you’re optimistic, Amanda, I think it’s pretty likely with a Republican congress and a Republican president that is going to get extended at the very least. He’s also though said that he would consider expanding it. Could you tell us about some of the policies? I know we don’t know if they’re going to get enacted, but what are some of the policies that you think people should be keeping an eye on next year to see if they do or do not get enacted?

Amanda:
Yeah, I mean, he joined the campaign. He talked a lot about exempting from taxes, tips, right? Overtime pay, social security. And it’s funny, for a lot of our clients, they’re like, well, that doesn’t really apply to me. If I am in real estate, I don’t really earn any tips or overtime pay. Maybe I don’t care as much, but you can imagine how for businesses and business could be a property management business or Airbnb co-host, right? You start to play around with the concept of, well, what is the definition of overtime pay?

Dave:
What

Amanda:
Is the definition of tips? Is that how I want to play my employees or my cleaners? So that one, those are new. Those expansions are kind of brand new concepts that we’ve not had in tax law before. So it’d be interesting to see which one of those paths, and if so, how they define and try to confine what the definitions of each of those are. Like I said, what is the definition of tips? Maybe Dave’s getting paid tips from BiggerPockets instead of salary.

Dave:
Yeah, I mean, I’ll take a hundred percent tip pay because I won’t pay tax. I was actually listening to a podcast, an economist talking about this, and they were saying there’s pros and cons to these types of things, but they were saying, if you’re someone who’s frustrated by tip culture, now if this happens, everyone’s going to be asking for tips. It’s already gotten pretty out of control, and I actually saw this article over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal about how Americans are, there’s a backlash starting against tipping, but if this policy comes in place, it’s econ 1 0 1, people follow financial incentives. They will find a way to get tipped rather than paid. So that could be a really interesting thing to keep an eye on.

Amanda:
Maybe the next BiggerPockets book will be how to make a lot of tips from your next rental property tax free.

Dave:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, just leave a tip jar for your tenants out to tip you for anything you do. Alright, Amanda, we have to take one more quick break After that, I want to ask you about salt taxes and how that could impact property values, but first a word from our sponsors. All right, we’re back with tax expert Amanda Hahn talking about taxes for 2025, and one that I am curious about is the so-called salt tax stands for state and local tax. And Amanda, correct me if I’m wrong, but from what I understand on your federal return, you can deduct a certain amount of tax that you pay to your state government and to your local government, but it’s currently capped at $10,000. So if you paid 15 in California, you’re probably paying more than $10,000 a year in local tax and you can only deduct $10,000 from your federal return. So how might that change in the future?

Amanda:
Trump has talked about increasing that from 10,000 to higher numbers, but he’s also floated around the idea of getting rid of that cap altogether, which would mean that if you paid 15,000 in state income taxes and let’s say you paid another 15,000 in your primary home property tax, now you can write off the whole 30,000 rather than just the current 10,000 limitation. I think that would be very, very favorable and welcomed for all the folks who live in high taxing states, right? California, Hawaii, New York, because the salt limitation has really reduced people’s ability to save on taxes for the last couple of years. If you think about it for someone who makes only W2 income, let’s say you don’t have any rental real estate at all, you don’t have a side business, just W2 income, our ability to deduct taxes that we pay to the state was one of the few very impactful things that you could write off. So once they limited to only $10,000, there was a huge uproar about that several years ago. I will say though, that this $10,000 state property tax limitation is only at the individual level For our personal thing, personal state taxes we pay, and then the property tax on our primary home being limited. For those of you investing in rental real estate, we always had the ability to deduct whatever the property taxes are for our rental, so that was never limited.

Dave:
Okay, that’s good to know. But didn’t salt tax deductions used to be unlimited and then this limit went in 2017, so that maybe is something Trump is altering about his new tax policy?

Amanda:
Yeah, we’re just going back to whatever the old law was that we used to be able to take advantage of. And the other thing I was going to say too is I know Republicans now sort of control Congress too, but my expectation is a lot of these tax changes that they were to come into effect will probably still be what we call temporary changes. So kind of like the tax Cuts and Jobs Act, it wasn’t like indefinitely we get a hundred percent bonus depreciation. It was only for a certain amount of time, it kind of dwindled down. So we do expect that to kind of be with these next rounds of changes that’ll still be temporary in nature, a lot more they have to come to an agreement on in order for any of these to be permanent changes, which what does that mean for investors? It just means that we just have to stay on top of the news and the law and be able to take advantage of whatever the new breaks are while they still exist.

Dave:
Totally agree. Staying on top of it, just wanted to say one more thing about Saul because I’m curious about how that might impact property values in places where this has been a significant issue like New York or New Jersey. You said California, I would imagine this has impacted affordability for people and that always impacts spending GDP housing prices, and so if this does get the limit either gets eliminated or increased, do you see some tailwinds for home prices in those areas? Something I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out on.

Amanda:
Yeah, I think so. I mean, not to say tax is the main reason people decide where to live, but it is one of the things top of mind when we think about where we want to live is. So in the past couple of years, you have places like California, New York where taxes are high and ever rising, and not only that, but we limit your ability to deduct what you paid, right? That’s kind of more incentive for people to move out. And so with the removal that maybe hopefully we’ll see a little bit of a reverse migration trend, but of course there’s a lot of different factors that come into play. But I do see just kind of in general policy impacting decisions. And for me as a real estate CPAI for sure see that back in a couple years ago when we had a hundred percent bonus depreciation, our clients were very, very aggressive about what they bought and all the acquisitions and stuff. And as you can see, when the tax benefits of investing in real estate dwindled down harder to get into real estate with interest rates and markets tightening than you see fewer deals being made. So it’s interesting. I mean, I guess that’s the intention, right? Of tax law and monetary

Dave:
Policies

Amanda:
To try to incentivize or disincentivize certain actions, but it’s just interesting to kind of see that in real life.

Dave:
Last question for you here is about capital gains and capital gains rates. If you’re unfamiliar, capital gains is basically the tax that you pay on the sale of assets rather than your ordinary income. And so if you own stock for a year and then you sell it, you pay capital gains tax, which I think is between 15 and 20%, and for many Americans that’s lower than your ordinary income. But I feel like politically people are always talking about the rate of capital gains. Should it go up, should it go down? Do you think there’s any chance that it changes in coming years?

Amanda:
Well, I mean if I had to guess, I feel like under Trump’s administration they’ll probably remain the same or go down. I don’t expect capital gains tax rates to go any higher, but yes, you’re right. I mean, generally the tax strategy is if you have an asset, whether it’s stocks or real estate, if you hold onto it for longer than 365 days, we get the long-term capital gains rate, and that’s what we call the preferred rate because it’s generally lower than your other like W2 job or a business that you, right? So it’s typically, we call it the lower long-term capital gains tax rate. What’s interesting is every time there’s an election, there’s always talks about 10 31 exchange. Is that going away? Is that being limited, being phased out, whatever it is? Surprisingly, we didn’t hear a lot about that in the election that just happened.
So I think for real estate investors, the reality is practically speaking, capital gains tax rates are not as important, or I guess are not as top of mind as 10 31 exchanges are. Because if we have 10 31 exchange like we do now, and assuming it’s not going to change, we always have the opportunity to delay our taxes. And so if we can’t sell a property reinvest in another one without paying any taxes, my capital gains, then it’s zero because I’m not paying any taxes on it. I think we were concerned when people were talking about getting rid of 10 31 exchange and a C in the capital gains rate. That’s kind of like two double whammies, but for now, I feel like we will probably continue to have both of these benefits.

Dave:
All right, great. Well, thank you Amanda, so much for sharing your knowledge with us and your predictions about the tax code, which is always hard to understand, but hopefully we can have you back because as with all economic policy tax law, the devil is in the details. We know some sort of broad ideas about what might happen and what President Trump intends to do, but what investors specifically should be thinking about and doing is really going to depend on the language that actually gets passed into the law. So as soon as that happens, assuming it does happen, we’d love to have you back.

Amanda:
Yeah, I would love to. And I also think too, tax law changes all the time. What I think a lot of people don’t know is we change our tax planning, not just from law change, but also from tax court case changes. As we all know, there are a lot of IRS got a lot more money for audit services where they’re auditing a lot of taxpayers, and what happens is from those court cases, the decisions of those court cases often impact how we do certain things. And so as an investor, you or you have an advisor that you can lean on to stay on top of those things so that you kind of have taxes on the back of your mind when you’re making business decisions about what should I buy, where should I buy, when should I buy tax law Change simply just means a change in strategy, and so being proactive really will go a long way to helping you to protect against any negative changes and helps you to take advantage of any positive changes.

Dave:
All right. Well, great. Thank you so much, Amanda. We really appreciate it. If you want to learn more from Amanda, her two books for BiggerPockets are amazing, and as we talked about, you can see here at BiggerPockets Momentum 2025, you can get tickets to that at biggerpockets.com/summit 2025. Thanks again, Amanda, and thank you all so much for listening. We’ll see you next time for the BiggerPockets podcast.