All Forum Posts by: Samuel Huntington

 Makes perfect sense! Thanks you for clarifying that question for us, that will certainly help us formulate our plan!  

@Ashish Acharya

Thank you for all the information, that is very helpful! Just to clarify further, which may have helped originally. Unit 1) currently rented, unit 2) not rented and the side which is currently being renovated. We are not currently living in unit 2 and have not changed our status to homesteading. The plan we were thinking of was to finish renovating that side, then move into unit 1. If we do it this way, would we be able to deduct the repairs/improvements made on that side against the future rental income? 

Thanks again! 

Sam

Hello all! 

Currently in the process of renovating our first rental property.  The property is a duplex in MN. We currently have one side rented out and are finishing up renovating the other half.  

We haven't had much experience with the taxes involved with rental properties, but are trying to optimize our potential deductions. Our question is, to be able to deduct our renovation expenses on the one half of the duplex, would we need to have that rented out by the end of the fiscal year? Or would it be possible to move into that unit while we renovate the other half?

Just trying to get our game plan figured out, any advice helps! 

Best, 

Sam 

Hello Bigger Pockets!

After much research, analyzing, and viewing properties we finally got our first investment property under contract this past weekend, a duplex located in the suburbs of the Twin Cities (MN)!

A brief introduction to help frame our financing question; I graduated just under a year ago with my PharmD and my girlfriend has been working with a local company in their sales support division for several years. We make a very good salary together and thought we had positioned ourselves financially in a very good place to buy our first live-in (i.e. the famous BP house-hack) investment property. Unfortunately, we quickly found out that multi-family properties were flying off the market in our area and our conventional financing offers (even without financing contingencies) were barely getting a glance compared to the numerous cash offers every property was receiving. Which, finally, leads me to our question….

We are fortunate that both our parents offered to supply the cash for us to make a cash offer. However, before we could do the proper research to figure out the best strategy to do this we found a property we loved and knew we needed to make our offer STAT. Sure enough, we got our first property under contract!

I’m wondering if anyone has any advice on how we should go about structuring this deal now? We intend to refinance shortly after to pay everyone back, but are looking for the best way to do this to avoid any unnecessary taxes, closing costs, etc. Any advice or thoughts would be much appreciated!

Thanks!