Capital gains, portability, and condo fees can quietly reshape what you actually walk away with after a long-held Florida home sale.
Are you 60 years or older and looking to sell your home this year? You could be sitting on a gold mine. The same goes for anyone who has owned a home for many years, say twenty or more. You could be sitting on a lot of money and equity, and you just have to be careful with it. Here are three things we want you to know before you make a move, and if any of them sound like your situation, let's schedule an in-person consultation to go over the details.
1. Understand the tax difference before you sell. The IRS currently allows the first $250,000 in profit for a single person and $500,000 for a married couple to be excluded from capital gains on the sale of a primary residence. So what happens if your gain is over that? You could be facing a pretty significant capital gains bill.
That's why it's really important to find those receipts and pull together every upgrade you've done over the years. Those improvements raise your cost basis, and using them to your advantage is how you avoid extra tax costs on a home you've owned for a really long time.
"You could be sitting on a lot of money and equity. You just have to be careful with it."
2. Florida portability can be a tremendous benefit. In the state of Florida, you can port up to $500,000 in accumulated assessed value savings from your current homestead to a new Florida homestead. To claim it, you need to establish your new homestead within three tax years of abandoning the old one.
Come November, the picture could shift a bit more depending on how the statewide property tax vote goes, and if you haven't seen it yet, watch our latest video on the homestead exemption changes on the ballot. Either way, if you're looking to downsize or move somewhere else in Florida, portability can mean tremendous tax savings, and it's worth sitting down to run your specific numbers.
3. Be careful with the downsizing math on condos. A lot of people are looking to downsize into a condo for lower maintenance, less to take care of, and less to worry about. Just be very careful there. Association fees have gone up quite a bit. Everything that happened with the Surfside condo collapse has led to tremendous requirements for reserves and for the inspections and maintenance work that buildings now have to complete.
Associations that spent years waiving reserves are now required to fund them, and that has caused special assessments and pushed some condo dues up sharply. Before you trade a house for a condo, look closely at the building's reserve funding and inspection status, because the monthly savings you're counting on may not be there.
Those are the three things we wanted to point out. We can go into a lot more detail if you'd like to discuss them, or even if you're just starting to think about selling your home. Call or text us at 561-220-2052, email us at info@tricoliteam.com, or visit tricoliteam.com. We'd love to talk to you.