offsetting real estate income

[Jeremy Frederick]

This is my first post on here so bear with me. I am looking for ideas on how to offset my real estate gains. A little background is I am single and make approximately 150k/year in my non-realestate W2 dayjob. I have 3 rental properties. I started with 1 and the past few years I would buy a fixer upper and use the noncapitalized repairs and expenses on it and the noncapitalized repairs and expenses on the existing units and combine that with the depreciation on all the units to offset the gains on the ones rented. This year, in addition to the 3 units (approximately $15,000 in profit) I was involved in a flip in which I made $25,000 in profit. I have a jeep and a truck presently and am considering selling my jeep and buying a 2nd truck to use solely for the business to offset this $40,000 profit. My questions are: 1. can I combine the rental and flip profits and buy another truck for 40k (keeping my original truck for personal use) and use the new truck solely for business and write off 100% of the cost in year 1 which would offset the 40k gain 2. Since I know my personal truck will eventually crap out on me, after the depreciable life of the work truck is done (im assuming 5 years) could I then begin using it as a personal truck, retire my other personal truck and buy a new work truck 3. this is a LOOOOOOONG shot, but is there a universe in which I spent MORE than 40k on a truck (or bought another investment property) and was able to move some of the loss to my W2 income to lower that taxable amount. I know I normally am not able to pull losses from my rental because its considered passive, but I'm wondering if the fact that I did a flip can move that income into active. thanks in advance for any guidance

[Natalie Kolodij]

You should get a good tax professional to help you map this all out. 

Buying an expensive vehicle isn't a tax strategy- it's wasting money. If the way you're saving on taxes is spending more money to show you made less money- that's not helping you. In the end you made less money to pay less tax.