Spreading Income over years to optimize TAX and ACCESS TO CAPITAL

[Jim Goebel]

Hello Bigger Pockets!  

Here's our interesting situation:  we have grown to roughly 13-15 rental units depending on how you count, but we're also starting to integrate more flip projects with the main intention of supplementing our income picture, and ensuring access to capital.  The spouse stepped away from her full time job this past March so we have now a full real estate outlook.  We're diversifying a bit with more flips, but also been dabbling in producing our own mill work (flooring, stairs, counters, etc) that we think will be another way to bring value to the table over time (and perhaps income as well).

We have a great relationship with a local bank where we have I think 5 mortgages, a commercial line of credit - etc: and they've been transparent in letting us know debt to income level threshholds to continue lending.  Because much of what we have going is rentals, that's a long term play and producing income, but not enough on its own to continue growing our capital access.

For clarification, we don't have any near term capital crunch going on, as we have 2 lines of credit (one commercial and one HELOC) that are getting us where we want to be - however looking ahead, we want to make sure we are easily above the minimum income levels to ensure we can grow our access to capital----------

So my question, is basically, when we have more of these flips happening, and we have very 'lumpy' income where we might have 25k or 80k profit on a per project basis, but we only have maybe 1-3 of these going per year, is there any way that we can kind of control how that income is split up year over year, to kind of 'smooth' it out?  We think if possible a low 100k income level will allow our taxes to be minimized but not sacrifice capital availability.  

Just wondering if there's any financial vehicle available to accomplish something like this?

Thanks in advance!!!