Vacation Property Mortgage

Is your holiday home qualified for taxation?

It may be a good idea to rethink the use of your holiday home as we approach the end of winter. When considering hiring your holiday home for one (or all) of the holiday seasons, you need to be clear about the complexity of the fiscal regulations, as well as the regulations for passively losing activities and the regulations for the holiday home.

Failure to properly plan can significantly restrict the ability to deduct rent and mortgage interest and thus raise your income taxes. However, with the right plans, you can not only use your holiday home for private use, but also cut your taxes for this and next years.

None of the rentals are subject to taxation if you are renting your holiday home for less than 15 calendar nights in a year. While all directly related lease charges would not be deductable for this less than 15-day lease term (insurance, utility, repair and servicing, etc.), the short lease term does not affect the ability to deduct mortgage interest and property related property related charges, usually the highest property related charges.

When your use of your holiday home does not surpass the greater of 14 calendar or 10 per cent of the number of calendar holidays for which it is leased, it is considered a leased property subjected to the regulations of passively losing activities and not a secondary dwelling.

Wayne, for example, has a vacation home. Throughout 2008, Wayne will use the property for 25 full day residential use and 300 full day rentals. As the 25-day period Wayne will use the house will not be more than 10 per cent of the total number of hire per day (300 times 10 per cent corresponds to 30 person days), the house is considered to be rented.

Fiscal implications and advantages of such incidental individual use are as follows. First of all, all rent revenues must be displayed. Miscellaneous letting costs such as write-downs, insurances, repairs as well as incidental costs are deductable. All such expenditure, which is due to private use, is not permitted.

All of these discounts are, however, restricted to the amount of earnings earned from these and other passively invested assets, provided that your revised restated net earnings ("MAGI") is greater than $150,000. Generally, if you do not have enough illiquid assets to cover these costs, your rent loss will be "suspended" until you either have enough illiquid assets or sell the property in a rateable business.

When your average monthly net operating profit (MAGI) is less than $150,000, a part of the accumulated net operating profit (loss) can currently be deducted from other revenues, and when your average operating profit (MAGI) is less than $100,000, the accumulated net operating profit (loss) is currently fully taxable. A key pitfall in classifying your home as a leased property as compared to a holiday home is the way mortgage rates are handled.

Mortgages are often the biggest deductions associated with owning the property. Whilst many tax payers rightly believe that mortgage interest is deductable for both a principal and a secondary residency (assuming that the various fiscal taxation rules relating to restrictions on debts are met), (1) mortgage interest is currently not deductable if your home is regarded as a rented property; and (2) mortgage interest due to your own use will not be deductable.

When your holiday home is not used as a private home only ( i.e. it is leased more than 14 calendar holidays per year), but is used for more than 14 calendar holidays or 10 per cent of the actual number of holidays leased, the holiday home is governed by the holiday home regulations.

If this is the case, you can still subtract the rent according to the rent usage rate, but only up to the "net profit" that you make from the rent. "The term "net profit" means the total amount of rent earned less otherwise permitted deduction (i.e. property tax and mortgage interest deductable whether the property is leased or not).

In addition, your expenditure must be debited from the rent in the following order: 1 ) interest, property tax and claims; 2 ) most other charges with the exception of consumption of fixed capital; and 3 ) consumption of fixed capital. Discounts in excess of total revenue may be applied to new account and offset against rent revenue in years to come, provided the same total revenue threshold is observed.

Importantly, it is important to bear in mind that the distinction between the deduction of expenditure on a property subjected to the provisions of liability losses (the "occasional use" policy described above) and a property subjected to the provisions of the holiday home (the "substantial use" policy described here) is generally so,

Expenditure arising in the negative asset value assumption scenarios is finally taxed ( when the property is sold or when the net passively earned amount is net), whereas expenditure arising in the significant private use assumption is taxed only if the total rent revenue in one year is higher than the expenditure in that year plus the additional costs in previous years.

The additional costs of previous years are not deductable due to the sale of the holiday home. Specifically, if the essential individual use hypothesis is true, many expenditures may never be taxed. If you want to calculate the amount of expenditure that can be used to clear rent revenue, you must apportion the expenditure between own requirements and rent usage.

Unfortunately, and not unexpectedly, the Fiscal Court and the IRS do not agree on the correct way of allocating funds. While the more liberal Fiscal Court approach, as expressed in the 1981 Bolton ruling, assigns mortgage interest and property tax according to the relationship of the overall number of rent ing day to the overall number of rent ing day in the year, the IRS approach apportions all expenditure according to the relationship of the number of rent ing day to the overall number of rent ing day and rent ing day.

Under the assumption, for example, that the property was held throughout the year, leased for 55 nights and used for 184 nights for private use, the Fiscal Court methodology would distribute 15 per cent (55 nights split by 366 days) of mortgage interest and property tax on rent, while the IRS methodology would distribute 23 per cent (55 nights split by 239 nights of private and lease use) of mortgage interest and property tax on rent.

As a rule, the Fiscal Court methodology results in a much lower amount of rent revenue being compensated by mortgage interest and property taxation, so that more revenue has to be compensated by other rent expenditure (which would otherwise not be deductible), and also results in a higher reduction of mortgage interest and property taxation on Annex A, single deductions, which further reduce the person's personal amount of taxation due.

Because of the complexities of the regulations for passively losing activities and the holiday home regulations, particular attention must be paid to ensuring that the use of the property on a residential and leasehold basis is balanced in such a way that the most favourable regulations and choices apply. In addition, you should reckon that you will be spending a considerable amount of your leisure property renting to assess your own use of the property.

In addition, if the object of your holiday home is to maximize the amount of fiscal benefit, you should spend a reasonable amount of your vacation home spending period to record the amount of your outlays.