Honolulu, HI · Member since 2016 · 11 posts · 0 votes
I live/work in Honolulu, HI, but I own a single-family rental in Newport News, VA. The property is near to extended family, and I want to kill two birds with one stone later this year and visit the property (for the first time in 18mos) as well as see family around the holidays. The property is under management, but I have a few things I'd like to check on personally. I want to get a clearer idea of what travel expenses I can write off, but I don't want to get into a gray area of risky tax practices, so here's my question: If I'm in town for a week, can I treat the first three days as a work trip and the rest as personal time, and write of the airfare and business costs with confidence that I'm not muddying the waters? Do I need to establish certain facts or circumstances to make sure the facts are clear in the event of an audit later?
Investor · San Francisco, CA · Member since 2017 · 303 posts · 327 votes
9y
I am not a lawyer/tax professional.
Here is what the IRS says:
https://www.irs.gov/publications/p463/ch01.html
On a side note, based on what I have learned from some professionals, your trip must be predominantly for business purposes: you must spend at least half of the total days on your business. I believe there should also be somewhere around 4 hours per each of those days spent on that business activity (meeting with PM, contractors, tenants, local agents, maybe going to open houses to "check" the market, do work on the rental, etc.)
One example I remember was a deductible seminar in a place like Hawaii (let's say New Orleans, in your case.) The seminar was on Thursday, Friday, and Monday. Because Saturday and Sunday only amounted to two days, and you would have no business-related activities on these days, the fact that you had to stay until/through Monday to finish the seminar, still means that majority of the time there was spent on deductible activities - thus whole trip, including air and hotel is deductible. But, again, more days were spent on business than on personal activities. And if your spouse is involved in your business (and you can prove if it if asked,) then her expenses are also deductible.