Act Now and Protect Your Home Equity!!
Your home is one of your largest assets and will likely play a key role in financing your retirement. The proposed "More Homes on the Market Act" currently before Congress seeks to address a longstanding issue in tax law that impacts the portion of your home that you have already paid off and own outright - your home equity.
This change would protect homeowners' equity from being eroded by inflation and stimulate the housing market by removing a key obstacle to selling homes with increased values.
Current tax law allows single filers to exclude just $250,000 in capital gains and joint married filers to exclude $500,000 when they sell their home – a provision that hasn’t been adjusted for inflation since it was enacted in 1997! Yet, recent increases in home values mean that millions of homeowners across the nation now have equity that exceeds these amounts, meaning they would owe tax when they sell their home, all because inflation has driven up the values.
Under the recently proposed “More Homes on the Market Act,” a homeowner who sells their home would be able to exclude up to $500,000 of capital gains – the excess of the net sales price over the original purchase price – as a single filer, or $1 million as a joint married filer, at tax time. The Act would also index these amounts to future inflation to protect homeowner equity moving forward.
This increase will safeguard a homeowner’s long-time investment and will enable them to sell their home without losing any of their equity to inflation, thus overcoming a key obstacle that is limiting the nation’s housing supply.
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