Hi @Steve Foley,For married persons, we do "10 in just his name, 10 in just her name," to get around it.

You could do a live in flip on a fixer upper and utilize the personal residence tax exclusion of $250k for an unmarried person and $500k for a married couple.

John is right (of course:)  The interest expense for a married couple must eclipse $11,000+ per year to be of any benefit.  

I am married to a realtor, so I just have him print them up for me.  

I had the fortune to live abroad though before getting married and starting in real estate.

If you lived in it 2 out of the last 5 years you will get 250k if you are single and 500k if you are married.

When you are deviating from the set agreements in place, you can be accused of offering favortism because someone is.....white/black/green/orange/married/gay/etc...in going forward, my advice is to get your tenants on a higher late fee schedule to make it very painful to pay the rent late. 

Since then I've gotten married.

One investor that I would see at public auctions all the time said that if I married his daughter he would tell me all of his secrets of making money (I often wondered what she looked like.), but I was married so, that didn't work.I started buying tapes (remember tapes, they'd get hung up in your tape player and wouldn't work anymore) on real estate investing, I took many seminars from speakers from a-far, digested dozens of books on investing and experimented creating buying offers using creative techniques (had to, had no money).I became an agent (that wasn't fun, but I did well) selling residential properties (that job diverted my energy from investing to driving around potential buyers), and earning almost nothing for my efforts.What I did not have when I started was a computer, no email no real estate chat rooms, no pagers, cell phones and no internet, Bigger Pockets wasn't born yet.I use to have to go to the court house and assessment office in person if I wanted to know who owned what, I use to run foreclosures after getting the information from the legal pending filing.I remember the first cell phone I purchased, it was call a 'bag phone' it was as big as a shoe box.

Youngest daughter was the one living their and had just graduated and was getting married and moving out.