How to write off your trip to Disney
@Brandon Turner recently touched on the deduct-ability of travel when visiting your out of town properties on the podcast, so I thought I would chime in. You may deduct 100% of your transportation expenses only if you spend more than 50% of your time on rental activities while at your destination. In other words, your rental activity days must outnumber your personal days. If you spend more time on personal activities than on rental activities, you get no transportation deduction. You may also deduct the destination expenses you incur on days when you do rental-related tasks such as the hotel bill, 50% of meals, parking ect . Expenses incurred on personal days at your destination are nondeductible. If your trip is primarily a vacation, more than 50% personal activities, the entire cost of the trip is a nondeductible. As long as your trip is primarily for your rental activity, you can add a vacation to the end of the trip, make a side trip purely for fun, or even enjoy evenings doing vacation activates, and still deduct your entire airfare, rental car, or standard mileage rate if using your own car. A hint to those taking kids to theme parks. Most the parks stay open till 11 or 12 midnight and it’s a lot cooler and less crowded in the evenings so leave the wife and kids at the pool in the hotel during the day and hit the parks at night. What you spend while having fun is obviously not deductible, but you can deduct all of your expenses while conducting rental activities. Another example, if you like to go to a particular ski resort a couple times a year. You buy a couple of rentals in and around the resort. Then take 3 days repair or improve the property, meet with the property manager, accountants, or lawyers about property then put in 2 days skiing. You can write off 100% of your travel but only 3 of the 5 days hotel stay and 50% of the meals and beverages during the first 3 days. Be careful looking at new properties might be considered “investor” activities so even if your looking at new deals while your there make sure you are also conducting other “rental related activates".