hi guys, I never looked at my tax bill, just always paid and started to get more into taxes.. I had a noob question, investment interest for simplicity sake is 100% deductible right? not including say AMT range.... if I can present a little calculation to make sure I understand what I'm talking about: (this is all simple and no brackets and such for simplicity sake.. ) say I made 500k from pure bonds, so all income.. say tax rate is at 40% on that. Say I had 100k in margin interest.. so 500k minus 40% is = 200k taxes, 300k take home.. then say we add the allowable investment interest ( $100k ), then is it 200k taxes, then take 100k off from investment interest meaning new tax bill at 100k, to arrive at = 400k take home? I got really confused on day, thinking investment interest really only saved you the percentage tax bracket you are in.. and oddly writing that that makes sense somehow still, as in deducting the amount you can, really only saves you as much as whatever tax bracket you are at, because deducting that amount say $1 in 50% bracket.. would mean losing .50 cents, but if you had one dollar in margin interest you could claim, that really means you saved that .50 cents of tax you would have had to pay right??? totally confused as above example it seemed dollar for dollar you get back what you paid to borrow, but this below seems to make sense also.... always any dummy clarification would be great. thanks!
Investment interest expense is a Sch A itemized deduction (assuming you itemize), unless you've got a trading business and then it's a business expense on Sch C.
That describes a credit, not a deduction. Deduction would be $500k - $100k (interest) = $400k x 40% = $160k. How that's reported and what's allowable isn't my wheelhouse.
I found this with a Google search which may answer your question. https://www.schwab.com/public/schwa.../resources/tax-deductible-investment-expenses