Five Strategies to Consider When Your Spouse’s Business Has a Net Operating Loss
If you’re trying to find ways to deduct those losses against your attorney income or restructure your investments this is a great episode to pick up some tips.
Tax reform made a lot of good changes in the tax law for the small-business owner. But the changes to the net operating loss (NOL) deduction rules are not in the good-changes category. They are designed to hurt you and put money in the IRS’s pocket.
Now, if you have a bad year in your business, the new NOL rules are designed to stop you from using your business loss to find some immediate cash. The new (let’s call them bad-for-you) rules certainly differ from the prior beneficial rules.
Don’t worry. We’re here to help. We’ll give you five strategies you can use to get an immediate tax benefit from your business loss. And the good news is that you’ll likely end up better off with our strategies than with your options before tax reform.
Partial Repeal of Prop 13 and Avoiding Capital Gains with the New Opportunity Zone Tax Credit
Two years from now, California voters may have a chance to touch the third rail of state politics…proposition 13. A coalition of good-government groups, social justice organizations, affordable housing advocates and teachers unions held press conferences across the state today announcing they had submitted signatures for a measure that would significantly increase property taxes on California businesses and generates tens of billions in revenue for local and state governments.
Opportunity zone funds are the hottest topic in commercial real estate. Last month, the first round of regulations was officially released, answering many of the questions investors have about the funds—but not all of them. There are still a set of unknowns, most of which should be answered in a second round of regulation announcements at the end of the year.
Personally, I don’t see a lot of focus on what the capital base looks like and who the right investors are for these projects. Is it going to be high net worth individuals that have capital gains, or is it going to be unaccredited investors that have capital gains?
Universal Life Insurance Lawsuits Underscore Product Risk
Attorneys need to be vigilant with their Universal Life (UL) policies and get a second opinion from a fee-only fiduciary. Because UL policies contractually allow insurers to adjust insurance costs up to a maximum rate (sometimes an increase into the double and triple digits on a percentage basis) based on certain factors.
Time after time, I encounter investors who were unaware that fees and expenses in a universal life or variable universal life policy can skyrocket. With universal life, that means understanding that a contract could go “sideways” if insurers credit the minimum interest rate to a policy and impose the highest contractual cost of insurance.