Underwhelmed with tax breaks of owning investment property

[Jeremy Rhodes]

I am doing my taxes myself via turbo tax and I must say I am underwhelmed with the tax breaks I am getting for owning a rental. My wife and I have strong W2 earnings at about 250k combined and it doesn’t appear that any flow through tax breaks are occurring due to owning a rental. We are unable to claim RE as a primary job for either of us with too much W2 earnings. Claiming depreciation doesn’t lower our personal tax situation either. I have looked into cost segregation but it seems like those losses also won’t be offset.

A little bit of background: we purchased our first rental in October of 2019 and have spent about $30k on the rehab of the property. No rent was collected in 2019 and it doesn’t seem like we will have a renter until some time in April 2020. Claiming these expenses as losses also has no effect on our bottom line.

Am I missing something? I planned on getting going with a CPA in the future but I was told that under 5 properties is doable for a landlord. Additionally if owning rentals isn’t going to help our total tax situation the way I envisioned when we went down this path, then maybe we can put off CPA help altogether since it appears we will be capped at achieving zero tax on our rental income.