Cost Segregation - Tax Deductions
Taxes are your enemy, but tax deductions are your friends. Taxes are the great bane of most businesses. Alas, business deductions act as a salve to cool the burning and itching of your bank account.
Business taxes can be summarized simply as calculating your total revenue, reducing this amount by as many tax deductions as you can and then paying tax on the remaining amount.
The wisdom of tax planning is to take advantage of all the benefits Uncle Sam has to offer. An increasingly popular federal tax savings phenomenon is utilizing a cost segregation study (CSS). These studies offer business owners of improved commercial real estate the opportunity to defer taxes, reduce their overall current tax burden, and free up capital by improving cash flow. A CSS study will identify any item that can be depreciated over a shorter period of time. These studies can result in accelerated depreciation deductions for properties including new buildings being constructed, renovations of existing buildings, leasehold improvements, and the purchase of real estate.
The primary goal of cost segregation is to identify building components that can be reclassified from real property to personal property. This results in a substantially shorter depreciable tax life and accelerated depreciation methods. Ordinarily, the cost of real, or section 1250, property is recovered over lengthy periods (27.5 and 39 years for residential and nonresidential property, respectively), using the straight-line method of depreciation. Personal, or section 1245, property is recovered over considerably shorter periods (5, 7 or 15 years), and employs accelerated methods of depreciation, such as 200% or 150% declining balance.
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