AE Tax Advisors

My husband is a surgeon earning over $800,000 a year, and I manage our rental property portfolio full-time. For years, our CPA treated all of our rental losses as passive, which meant we could not use them against my husband's surgical income. That was a costly mistake.

AE Tax Advisors walked me through Real Estate Professional Status -- a provision in the tax code that allows a qualifying spouse to treat rental losses as non-passive. Because I spend more than 750 hours per year on real estate activities and it constitutes more than half of my working hours, I qualify. Our old CPA never even asked about my hours or suggested this was possible.

Once we established REPS, AE Tax performed cost segregation studies on our rental properties. The accelerated depreciation generated substantial paper losses. Because of my REPS designation, those losses were no longer trapped as passive -- they could offset my husband's W-2 income dollar for dollar.

The result: $211,000 in tax savings in a single year. We went from a massive tax liability to a manageable one. The savings were so significant that we used part of the refund to acquire another rental property, which will generate even more depreciation benefits going forward.

AE Tax also provided a detailed hour tracking system and log template so my REPS qualification is well-documented in case of audit. They think of everything.

For any household where one spouse has high W-2 income and the other is involved in real estate, the REPS strategy paired with cost segregation is transformative. AE Tax Advisors is the team to make it happen.