Deducting Expenses Prior To Buying 1st Rental

[Ronnie Howard]

I’ve been a lurker for a little while now. Listening to podcasts, reading and suffering from a case of analysis paralysis. Ready to start actually acting and curious how it works with expenses I incur prior to purchasing my first rental.

If I’m not able to find and purchase a property before the end of the year can the expenses be rolled to the next year?

Do I need to setup some type of structure for those expenses to go towards? A DBA?

Thanks for any advice.

-Ronnie

[Ashish Acharya]

Originally posted by @Ronnie Howard:

I’ve been a lurker for a little while now. Listening to podcasts, reading and suffering from a case of analysis paralysis. Ready to start actually acting and curious how it works with expenses I incur prior to purchasing my first rental.

If I’m not able to find and purchase a property before the end of the year can the expenses be rolled to the next year?

Do I need to setup some type of structure for those expenses to go towards? A DBA?

Thanks for any advice.

-Ronnie

If you don’t identify a rental property, most of the expenses will be personal in nature. 

Flipping is little different. If it was a flipping activity, some of the operational cost would be deductible.