Keeping your home until death has advantages. At death, your estate avoids both capital gains and recapture taxes, and passes the home to your heirs at a stepped-up fair market value basis. This combination triggers a good number of income tax planning strategies.

Stay with your mom and dad on a business trip, and create tax deductions by paying them for business lodging. You have a choice: deduct the cost of staying at the big hotel downtown or deduct the cost of staying with your parents. Either way, the choice of location does not change the fact that you are on a tax-deductible business trip.

Learn how to avoid payroll tax problems when you hire a nanny or other household worker. Your best bet is likely a payroll service that specializes in “nanny tax” compliance.

Repairs to your home give you zero tax benefits. Improvements to your home add to your basis and reduce your taxes. Thus, don’t repair your home. Improve it!

The IRS has issued a new revenue ruling granting bigger deductions than the courts have granted on home mortgage interest deductions for alternative minimum tax purposes.

For 2011, you can qualify for the uncapped and unlimited 30 percent tax credit for installing qualified solar, wind, and geothermal in your home, vacation home, or other residence.

When the bank forecloses on a home, tax law comes into play in some surprising and often beneficial ways, especially this year. Tax law treats recourse and nonrecourse mortgages in completely different ways, but with a personal residence, the end result can be pretty much the same.

When you are up against the two-out-of-five-year rule for enabling the $250,000 home-sale exclusion ($500,000 if you are married), your strategy might include creating an S corporation to which you would sell your home.

The cabin at the ski hill could be a hotel, a residential rental property, or a personal residence. It depends on your personal use of the property; the length of rental periods; and documentation of your time, others’ time, expenses, and activities.

Should you buy or rent your home? What gives you the best quality of life and monetary value? Here is what you need to consider.

Is this the right time to buy a home? Tax credits make the home purchase more appealing. Learn if the home purchase is right for you or your relatives. Use the home analyzer software, free, that’s linked inside this article.

Distributing the assets of an estate needs a tax plan to ensure the favorable results embedded in the tax law.

You can be a dealer with respect to some properties and an investor with respect to others. You can also subdivide lots and obtain tax-favored capital gain treatment, but you need the right numbers and a good plan.

Learn the federal income tax rules on business mileage to increase vehicle deductions. The four questions and answers in this article give you a clear roadmap of the rules along with the strategies you need to pocket more cash from your business.

If you operate one business with two operations in separate states, you need to know the rules to tax deduct overnight business travel between the two locations. You also need to know these tax deduction rules if you have two businesses in two states.

You may claim a tax deduction for the business portion of your home security system regardless of your qualification for the office in the home deduction.

Your home equity loan can give you a full, partial, or no deduction for your interest. If you will get zero or a reduced benefit, make the necessary changes to protect your tax benefits.

If you are using home equity loan proceeds for your rental property LLC, you need to pay attention to both the legal and tax aspects of that transaction. The legal part is needed for liability protection. The tax part is needed to ensure your tax deductions.

This new law gives you 30 percent uncapped and unlimited tax credits for installing qualified solar, wind, or geothermal energy improvements in your home, vacation home, or other residence.

Tax credits are best. They reduce your taxes dollar for dollar.

Now, you can pocket a 30 percent tax credit of up to $1,500 when you install qualifying energy approved windows, doors, HVAC, insulation, water heaters, roofs, and similar property in your principal residence.

With net business income less than $115,647, the sole proprietor with two qualifying children and a stay-at-home spouse can hire the spouse and pay a wage of $6,000 to create a $1,200 child care credit with no change in their joint income taxes—other than realization of the $1,200 credit.

You do not need a tax deductible office in your home to deduct the cost of business furniture and equipment in your home

Higher inflation could be good for that home you buy today—and if you buy today, you will have today’s low interest rate. That’s a pretty good combination. Then add the 2009 tax credit and get the government to pay you $8,000 for taking the chance. Sounds like you hit the trifecta doesn’t it?

Take advantage of the government’s tax-free $250,000 home-sale-profit exclusion by selling your home to yourself ($500,000 if married). By forming an S Corporation, you can sell your house to your corporation and eliminate the taxes by utilizing Section 121. There are important details, though, so read carefully.

Before this new housing rescue law, the savvy taxpayer could convert his old rental or vacation home into a principal residence, live in it for two years, and then sell it to take advantage of the $250,000 and $500,000 exclusion of gain rules. Now, you need to make revisions to that old tax plan to cope with this new law.

The new housing rescue law (1) creates a $7,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers; (2) creates up to a $500 property tax deduction for the taxpayer who does not itemize deductions; (3) destroys some or all of the $250,000 tax-free exclusion for sales of vacation homes and rentals converted to principal residences; and establishes 1099-style reporting to the IRS of gross income from credit card receipts.

If you have a land easement on the property you are selling, you can get up to $250,000 tax-free. We show you how to do it with a home sale exclusion

Your son may not deduct the interest on the mortgage payments he makes on your behalf. You need to reconsider and restructure this arrangement.

At what point is a home destroyed so that it is eligible for the “involuntary conversion rules and the $250,000 ($500,000) exclusion of capital gains rules? In this chief counsel advice, the IRS gives some clarity.

Tax law treats foreclosure as a sale of your home. If you sell your home, you have a gain or loss. Most gains are taxable. Losses on a foreclosure or other sale of your personal home are not deductible.

The $250,000 home-sale exclusion is a major tax break. To qualify for the exclusion, you must have owned and lived in your home for two of the past five years. You can get out of the “two out of five year” rule by unforeseen circumstances, like, say, marriage.

To rent or to buy? That is a question. Use this easy software that comes with this article to find what’s best, after taxes—no guesswork. Identify 12 reasons why renting is best. Identify 11 reasons why buying is best. Consider everything in just a few minutes.

If you make repairs to your home for the purpose of making the home a rental property, you may deduct them, if you do it right. You cannot, for example, deduct repairs made to your home (not rental property). You might also consider filing the improvements as capital expenditures.

When the seller does not transfer legal title to the buyer, the buyer can still be the owner when the buyer passes the beneficial ownership tests.

The $250,000 exclusion on the sale of this home is complicated by the mother and daughter owning this home together.

The tax rules make your vacation home either a personal residence or a rental property. When you qualify the vacation home as a rental property, you then may use the Section 1031 rules to defer taxes and build more net worth.

When you have your corporation reimburse your home office as an employee business expense, you treat the home as if you had claimed the office-in-the-home deduction personally.

The corporate reimbursement of the owner-employee for office-in-the-home expenses includes condo fees and mortgage payments.

The corporate reimbursement to you, the employee, for the business use of your home office requires that you recognize the depreciation component of the reimbursement as if you had claimed the office in the home on your personal tax return.

Wow! In one day, the IRS released three private letter rulings that provide a roadmap to the $250,000 (single) and $500,000 (married) home-sale profit exclusions for taxpayers who fail, because of hardship, the 2-out-of-5-year tests for ownership and use.

Interest paid on a life insurance loan to buy a home does not count as deductible mortgage interest.

To deduct mortgage interest, (1) you must have title, (2) the mortgage must be in your name, (3) the home must secure the mortgage, and (4) you must make the mortgage payments from your money.

Historic rehab tax credits can put you in Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed favorite spot. Tax credits often exceed the cash you invest in the project making the historic rental or office building a “nothing down” deal for you. Add nonrecourse financing to the package and you have no personal risk. None of your cash in the deal and no personal risk—this is Mr. Trump’s favorite spot. You might do as many Congressional leaders do: Donate your personal home’s historic facade to charity so can realize big tax credits.

The couple in this court case did not keep the right records to prove the improvements they made to their home. This failure to keep the records probably saved them some personal time, but it cost them taxes on $101,907 of capital gains. What do you suppose the hourly cost of this failure—considering that the time spent to keep these records has to be very few hours? You really do need the right tax records and it takes very little time when you know what to keep.

Learn the federal income tax rules on business mileage to increase vehicle deductions. The four questions and answers in this article give you a clear roadmap of the rules along with the strategies you need to pocket more cash from your business.

You do not need to be married during the 24 months of residential use to claim the $500,000 exclusion of profits on the sale of your home.

This taxpayer takes out a $4 million mortgage and makes the interest on $1 million of the mortgage deductible as home-mortgage interest and the interest on the remaining $3 million of the mortgage deductible as investment interest.