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Protecting Your Benefits

The Government is broke.  What do they do to fill their coffers?  They slowly but surely chip away at tax benefits and create new taxes for you.  One tax benefit that has been up in the air is the mortgage interest deduction where you can deduct your interest payments from your taxes.  President Obama during his speech at the Democratic National Convention shows his support for keeping the mortgage interest deduction which is good news for current and future home owners.  Tax benefits are one of the main perks of owning real estate.

To go further back, during the Republican National Convention, protecting the mortgage interest deduction wasn’t in their platform.  However, with the effort and pressure from the National Association of Realtors, protecting the mortgage interest deduction was inserted into the platform.

What do you think?  How would you feel if Government were to take away this tax benefit designed for current and future homeowners?

Obama Promises to Protect MID for the Middle Class

DAILY REAL ESTATE NEWS | FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 07, 2012

President Barack Obama in his speech last night to accept the Democratic nomination for president said he will protect the mortgage interest deduction for middle-class families.

“I refuse to ask middle-class families to give up their deductions for owning a home … just to pay for another millionaire’s tax cut,” he said.

The president’s speech focused heavily on preserving the financial health of middle-class households, and he said that any deficit reduction and tax increases that he would seek in a second term would not affect households earning up to $250,000.

“I want to reform the tax code so that it’s simple, fair, and asks the wealthiest households to pay higher taxes on incomes over $250,000 — the same rate we had when Bill Clinton was president,” he said, “the same rate we had when our economy created nearly 23 million new jobs, the biggest surplus in history, and a lot of millionaires to boot.”

Alluding to the excesses in mortgage originations during the housing boom and the subsequent mortgage crisis, the president touted the rules that are now in place to protect households from taking out loans for which they don’t have the ability to repay. “We believe that when a family can no longer be tricked into signing a mortgage they can’t afford, that family is protected, but so is the value of other people’s homes, and so is the entire economy,” he said.

The president says in a Q&A for the September/October issue of REALTOR® Magazine, which comes out in mid-September, that he’s open to ensuring the rules don’t cut off the flow of mortgage credit to otherwise creditworthy borrowers.

“We will work with regulators to strike the appropriate balance for a healthy market that is open, fair and sustainable over the long term,” he said in the Q&A.