Personal Residence & Capital Gains on tax bill (2018)

[Matt Crusinberry]

I was wondering if there was a CPA out there that could clarify on the new tax bill that was recently passed. Is there any exclusions that have been added to the capital gains portion for personal residence. My personal situation is this... I purchased the home in DEC of 2015, and I just put it on the market. It now has a pending sale, however it's not going to close until 10 Jan. 2018. Am I going to have to pay capital gains taxes on this property?

Thanks for your help.

[Linda Weygant]

The answer is, it depends..

As @Brian Schmelzlen indicated, both the house and senate bill have switched the 2 of 5 occupancy requirement on your personal residence to 5 of 8.  If that ends up in the final bill, then there is no guarantee that, if this was your personal residence, that you will escape this new requirement.  While the senate bill does allow a grandfather clause for houses under contract before the law goes into affect, the house bill does not and nobody knows at this point how it's all going to play out.

The last thing I saw is that the house republicans were displeased with the number of last minute provisions that were put into the senate version that they would not vote for any of those provisions.  But without those provisions, many senate republicans won't vote for it either.

It's entirely possible that no tax legislation gets passed at all or, at the very least, what we get is a broad sweep of tax cuts for businesses, but none of the smaller items which impact individuals.

It's still a crap shoot at this point, emphases on *crap*.