starting home based business question for board experts

[kostakio]

Anyone have rental homes in a LLC? Wouldnt be doing it soon but in 15 years my house will be paid off and I will be looking to into buying a bigger home and renting my current home.

Couple questions. Can I just write off basically any expense and say it was for the house/llc.

Like say I went to vegas for a "Home decorators expo", could i deduct the expenses incurred during the trip from the profit I made renting the house?

I have a rental LLC.  It all depends on how aggressive you want to be with your taxes.  You can pretty much do anything you want until you get audited.  If you do this you probably want to get all your new stuff shipped to the rental location.   Or at the very least don't have it shipped/delivered to your house  and then try and deduct it off the rental.   The Vegas thing seems a little over aggressive to me.

isn't there some rule (or at least rule of thumb) about how many years in a row a business can lose money before the IRS gets involved?

There is some type of rule for losses on passive activities like rentals.  I'm not too familier with the rules but I think the jest is you generally can't deduct anything over your income off the properties.  So basically you can't use a loss on rentals to offset income from your real job.   

clearly. you could've just said this and stopped there.

also, it's "gist" not "jest."  a great rule to live by is that if you're not absolutely sure what a word is, don't use it. you're welcome.

next time I write a term paper I'll take your advice.  For this purpose it seems you got the "gist" of what I was saying.  You seem to have knowledge in this area, do you have something to add about deducting losses from rentals?  I do have experience with a rental LLC, I don't have experience with recurring operating losses from one.     

[Pete]

small businesses are what is killing america.  we all need to support legislation to stop their proliferation.  study after study has proven my words to be correct, yet every tom, dick, and harry, seem content on continuing to erode the foundation of our country.

Nailed it.

[pissclams]

i guess when rick daris was talking about getting a portrait of Mao Zedong tattoo across his back, he wasn't kidding.

[Dr Rick Daris]

this all seems ridic complicated. i'm basically the guy on the board who finally just meandered over to the credit card thread and wants to know if he can sign up for a 35k delta card and use the miles to go to san antonio for a wedding in three weeks. what a horrible decision to start this thread.

[Rage Against the McKee]

small businesses are what is killing america.  we all need to support legislation to stop their proliferation.  study after study has proven my words to be correct, yet every tom, dick, and harry, seem content on continuing to erode the foundation of our country.

Yep. They aren't just content with letting it continue, though. They seem to be trying to speed it up.

[puniraptor]

this all seems ridic complicated. i'm basically the guy on the board who finally just meandered over to the credit card thread and wants to know if he can sign up for a 35k delta card and use the miles to go to san antonio for a wedding in three weeks. what a horrible decision to start this thread.

but srsly you should be operating your 5 bedroom bordello as an llc