Tax strategies for high income W2 earner

[Tuan Hoang]

Hey everyone,

I am a high income W2 health care provider. Taxes were never the main reason I wanted to get into real estate, however I took a 30min coaching call during the lockdown to discuss strategies and the person I discussed with recommended I look at my investing from a different perspective. This coach recommended that I not concern myself as much with cashflow, but instead invest in more expensive properties and use depreciation/write offs to offset my W2 income. I quickly found out that it is a terrible strategy (not concern yourself with cashflow) and now just recently found out it isn't even possible to use passive losses against my active income and was quite disappointed. 

I was wondering if investing in actual properties would help me from a tax standpoint other than provide potentially tax free rental income? (I cannot qualify for REPS under my current circumstances) I know this is more of a personal decision/preference and I know that there other advantages to investing in real estate, however if tax free supplemental income is the main benefit, I may instead look to focus more on syndications and not take on the headaches and massive time requirement of owning rental properties.