🏡 Your home might owe more tax than you think

Tax Strategies

🏡 The home sale exclusion time bomb ticking under remote workers

If you bought a house during the 2020-2021 remote work migration and it’s now worth a small fortune, congratulations, and also, maybe sit down. The tax break that’s supposed to shield your gain was written back when a Blockbuster membership still made sense.

In 2020 and 2021, remote workers left expensive cities for places like Boise, Austin, and Tampa, buying homes at prices that now look almost fictional. Those markets boomed, and some of those homes are worth 50-100% more today, which is great for net worth and less great for the IRS’s opinion of your net worth.

The Section 121 exclusion hasn’t kept pace. Home prices have roughly tripled nationally since 1997; had the exclusion been indexed to inflation, it would sit closer to $500,000 (single) and $1 million (married) today. Instead, it’s frozen exactly where Congress left it, like a tax law preserved in amber, or possibly acid-wash denim.

A couple who bought a $400,000 house in 2020 and sells for $950,000 in 2026 has about $550,000 in gain. After the $500,000 exclusion, the remaining $50,000 is taxable, even though it just felt like “living somewhere that got expensive,” not “engaging in a taxable event.”

Two other traps: if you moved again before hitting two full years in the home, you could lose the exclusion entirely, not just the amount over the cap. And if you claimed a home office deduction using actual expenses (including depreciation), that portion of gain isn’t excludable at all.

Before you list, know your basis (purchase price plus qualifying improvements) and your exact ownership/use dates. If you’re close to the cap, talk to a professional about timing before you sign anything. And this is all federal — most states with an income tax follow the same $250,000/$500,000 exclusion, but not all do, so check your state’s rules, too.

👉 Find out if your home is eligible

Filing Made Simple

☀️ The clean energy tax credit gold rush is already over. Here’s what’s left.

If solar panels or a heat pump have been on your someday list, we have bad news and slightly less bad news. The bad news: the federal credit that made it a no-brainer already packed up and left. The slightly less bad news: it’s not the only incentive in town.

Section 25D covered 30% of solar, geothermal, and battery storage costs with no dollar cap, originally through 2034. Section 25C covered up to $3,200/year for insulation, windows, and heat pumps, through 2032. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, moved both expiration dates up to Dec. 31, 2025, which in tax-law years is basically last Tuesday.

If you already installed qualifying equipment before the end of 2025, congratulations, you (hopefully) claimed the credit on your 2025 return already. But if you’re planning ahead for tax season 2027 and were mentally counting on that credit to offset a project this year, here’s what’s actually still standing:

State tax credits. A number of states run their own solar, geothermal, or efficiency credits independent of the federal government, and OBBBA didn’t touch a single one of them. Some stack on top of utility rebates, some don’t — depends on the state.

Utility rebates. Plenty of utility companies offer cash-back or bill-credit programs for heat pumps, insulation, and solar installs, funded separately from federal tax policy. These come and go based on the utility’s own budget, so availability varies more than tax law does.

SRECs. In states with solar renewable energy credit markets, your panels don’t just save you money on your electric bill, they generate a separate, sellable credit for every megawatt-hour you produce. Not every state has a market for these, but where they exist, they can be a meaningful ongoing return.

Property tax exemptions. Some states won’t reassess your home’s value upward just because you added solar panels, which keeps your property tax bill from creeping up as a side effect of going green.

None of these replace a 30% uncapped federal credit — let’s not pretend otherwise. But “nothing left” and “one thing left” are very different situations, and most homeowners assume it’s the former without checking.

👉 See which state and utility incentives are still available near you 

Tax Strategies

📊 Short-term vs. long-term capital gains, explained without the jargon

Selling an investment is easy. Understanding how it gets taxed is where most people’s eyes glaze over. Here’s the one number that determines almost everything: how many days you owned it.

Short-term gains (held one year or less) get added to your regular income and taxed at your ordinary bracket: 10% up to 37%. No special break, no participation trophy.

Long-term gains (held more than one year) get preferential rates. For 2026: single filers pay 0% up to $49,450 of taxable income, 15% up to $545,500, and 20% above. Married filing jointly roughly doubles those thresholds.

Example: a single filer with $90,000 in taxable income sells an investment for a $20,000 profit. Held 11 months, that gain is taxed at their marginal rate (likely 22-24%), costing $4,400-$4,800. Held one year and a day, it’s taxed at 15%, around $3,000. Same sale, same gain, different outcome.

The clock starts the day after you acquire the asset. “More than one year” means a year and a day, not a year to the day — the IRS is famously unmoved by close calls.

Also worth knowing: high earners may owe an extra 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax above $200,000 (single) or $250,000 (married) MAGI. And losses offset gains of the same type first, then the other type, then up to $3,000 of ordinary income per year.

If you’re close to the one-year mark on something you’re selling, check the actual purchase date. A few weeks of patience can be the cheapest tax planning around.

👉 Learn more about capital gains tax

Wacky Tax Tales

📺 “Chrisley Knows Best,” except when it came to taxes

Todd and Julie Chrisley built a reality TV empire on the premise that they had it all figured out. The IRS, as it turns out, disagreed.

Before “Chrisley Knows Best” made them famous, prosecutors say the Chrisleys used falsified documents to get over $30 million in fraudulent bank loans, then took out new loans to pay off the old ones, a financial strategy best described as “musical chairs, but the chairs are debt.” When that ran out, Todd declared bankruptcy in 2012 and walked away from $20+ million in debt.

Once the show took off, prosecutors say the couple ran their real income through their production company to hide it from the IRS, including roughly $500,000 in back taxes Todd owed. When the IRS started asking questions, the couple moved assets into a relative’s name, a move that tends to make cases worse, not better, and also tends to be the exact plot twist every white-collar-crime documentary is waiting for.

A jury convicted the couple in June 2022 on bank fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy charges. Todd was sentenced to 12 years in prison and Julie to seven, plus the couple was ordered to pay $17.8 million in restitution. Their accountant, Peter Tarantino (no, not that Tarantino), got three years in prison and was released in January 2025.

The Chrisleys reported to prison in January 2023. However, that’s not the end of the story. President Donald Trump pardoned both in May 2025, saying he believed their sentences were “pretty harsh”; they were released the next day, having served a little over two years. Tarantino’s conviction stood.

Whatever your read on the pardon, the underlying case is a familiar shape: unreported income, then evasive moves once the IRS came calling, turned a fraud case into a much longer sentence. The IRS generally cares less about how the money was earned than whether it was reported. In that narrow sense, it’s less judgmental than reality TV.

👉 Get the juicy details here

The quick (and slightly prickly) stories we didn’t have time to get to:

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