A Blog About Tax Savings for Building Owners

Tag: Cost Segregation Estimate

Keep Your Cash – How a Cost Segregation Estimate Can Help with Quarterly Tax Payments for Building Owners

Building owners….did you know that you could use an cost segregation ESTIMATE to help you manage your cash flow and perhaps pay less in quarterly tax payments or year end payments? How? Follow along…

When we provide an owner with an estimate, we are almost always conservative in our projection. If we say we believe that we’ll be able to identify say $200,000 in additional increased accumulated depreciation expense, we’ll normally hit at least that number 96-97% of the time. Occassionally the actual results come in a bit lighter.

But let’s say you owe a quarterly tax payment of $15,000 this quarter. You own a building but haven’t done cost segregation on it yet. Your building is profitable and the reason you own the tax money is in a big part because of the commercial real estate you own or the business you operate at the CRE building you own. You contact us. Our team done an initial analysis and says we can identify $200,000 in depreciation. Let’s say your tax rate is 32%. And let’s say you put this building into service in 2023 so bonus depreciation is 80%. Here’s the math:

$200,000 in depreciation x 80% (bonus depreciation) x 32% (tax rate) = $51,200 in estimated tax savings. We will provide you with a nice PDF for your records. You can use the depreciation expense expectation in the calculations you and your tax professional run to figure out what your quarterly payment might need to be. It could be that our estimate will wipe out your quarterly tax obligation. In this scenario noted, it very well could have done that.

This strategy can be used at any point in the year. It doesn’t just need to be reserved for year end tax planning. Reach out if you have questions and would like to discuss. John Murphy, Cost Segregation Specialist, 864-276-1448

Utilizing Cost Segregation to Offset Quarterly Taxes Due

Most people think of utilizing cost segregation when it comes time to settle up their taxes owed at the end of the year. Because of that, we are very busy as you can imagine leading up to March 15th for corporate returns, April 15th for personal returns and then with extensions it’s September 15th and October 15th, respectively. But did you know that you could use a cost segregation study…even an estimate to help offset your taxes owed for your quarterlies?

The September 15th quarterlies are due next week and many business and building owners will be writing checks to the IRS. At the same time most of these owners are likely sitting on untapped depreciation that they could use to offset this tax obligation. How so? At this point there isn’t time to get an engineering-based cost segregation study completed. Those tax a solid six weeks. However, an owner could reach out to me and get an estimate for his/her building to see what kind of tax savings might be available should he go forward with a cost segregation study.

Let’s say you own a million dollar commercial building and you’ve had it for a couple of years. Or maybe you own a rental home, a duplex, a small apartment…it doesn’t matter really. If you own an income producing residential investment or commercial property may be able to apply this strategy as well. Please run this past your own personal tax advisor.

Let’s take that $1 million commercial building that you’ve owned for 3 years. You’ve taken a small amount of depreciation straight line. But if you were to segregate out the 5 year and 15 year class life property, you might be able to take 15-20% of the building’s basis this year and lower your tax bill. On a building like that it mean a tax savings of $50-$75,000. Let’s say you owe $15,000 for your September 15th quarterly tax payment but you have a cost segregation estimate from us showing that if you do a study, we’ll save you $50,000 on your income taxes. Well you know have that as your documentation, should it ever be needed, that you don’t owe any quarterly taxes September 15th. Oh, and the study would cost you a lot less than that $15,000 tax bill BTW.

As we anything I publish, this is not tax advise but merely a strategy some building owners use to help offset their tax liability. Please consult with your own tax advisor on any and all tax decisions including possibly utilizing a cost segregation study.

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