Dear Liz: My house was burned down in the Palisades fire. I lived in the house for 25 years and lost everything. I thought there may be a silver lining with tax deductions. Much to my surprise, I am supposed to use the purchase price from 25 years ago as my adjusted cost basis. The insurance settlement is not going to be enough to rebuild but is more than my cost basis. I will end up with “casualty gain” instead. Is this possible?
Answer: After losing your home and finding out you were underinsured, the news that you might have a taxable gain must have been a gut punch.
The IRS calls it an “involuntary conversion” when your property is destroyed and you receive insurance proceeds. If the insurance payment exceeds your tax basis in the property, that’s known as a casualty gain.
You can defer tax on this gain if you use the insurance payout to rebuild or buy a replacement property, says Mark Luscombe, a principal analyst with Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting. Normally you’d have two years to use the insurance proceeds, but in a federally declared disaster such as the Los Angeles fires, the deadline is extended to four years.
The IRS may be willing to further extend the deadline under some circumstances, such as contractor delays, Luscombe says. But don’t count on an extension if you’re simply unable to find a replacement property.
If you do purchase a new home elsewhere, any gain from the sale of the lot where your previous home stood also would have to be reinvested in the new home to avoid a current tax on the gain, Luscombe says.
However, the home sale tax exclusion also applies to involuntary conversions. The exclusion allows you to shelter up to $250,000 of gains ($500,000 if married filing jointly) on a sale or involuntary conversion, as long as you’ve owned and lived in the property as your primary residence for two of the last five years. So you could exclude that amount of gain and defer the rest if you rebuild or find a replacement property, Luscombe says.
This is complicated territory, so please make sure you hire a tax pro to guide you.
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