Can I take losses against my wife's W-2 income? Need a good CPA

[Larry Watson]

I started this new thread because I wasn’t making myself completely clear about my tax situation. I have been told that since my wife has W-2 income that is well above 200K per year we have to suspend our real estate rental losses because there is a threshold that you cannot take deductions after you reach a certain amount of income.

We have some rental property that is in our name for now and file those on a schedule E. We have an LLC that has the rest of our rental homes as well as 7 apartments. I usually have a total of around 35K in losses every year and after a few years I have a total carryover of 90K in losses.

I understand that if you are not a real estate professional you can only deduct up to 25K but since I sold my office equipment business in February of this year I now work full time in our real estate business. We have 12 rental homes along with the 7 apartments and I manage all of them. I also make some of the repairs myself while sometimes call in professionals for repairs I don't care to deal with. In addition I work full time with a Real Estate company since I got my NC Real Estate Brokers License in March of this year. I also spend a good amount of time searching on the MLS and driving and hunting homes to add to our portfolio. I don't think it is a problem that I qualify as a full time real estate professional so my losses should be unlimited.

My question that I really want to know is it true that I must keep suspending our losses in real estate or can we use these losses to offset my wife’s W-2 income?