Question by iblooking4it: How do you determine adjusted basis of home and land for a home based business?
Does anyone know how to determine or find the adjusted basis of home and land for my tax return? I have a home based business in which a percentage of the house is used as a office and storage and need to figure this out for my fedral return? Any help would be appreciated……………………….
Best answer:
Answer by Rocky
Hi there! Congrats on starting a business and starting it from home! There are a lot of good tax breaks and the home office deduction is certainly one of them.
The adjusted basis is basically the purchase price of your house. You can also add certain acquisition costs to the basis of your house. So say you purchased your house for $ 200k and paid $ 1,000 in title search and deed prep fees, your adjusted basis would be $ 201k. Also if you made any improvements to your house, you will add those to the basis too. New roof? New HVAC? Add those to your basis.
Now you have to figure out the value of the land that your house sits upon. You can usually find this on your appraisal. Or you can also find this on your county’s property tax website. They usually separate how much they assessed you for your land and for your house.
Those are the two pieces of info you need. You simply subtract the land value from your adjusted basis and that is the amount you use for depreciation.
Remember, you also need to figure out the business percentage of your house too. That is just the square footage of your office divided by the square footage of your house.
I hope this helps! 🙂
Happy computing.
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