forgive me if this isn’t posted in the appropriate forum, so if there is a better place to post this let me know.
Background: I have a moderate understanding of tax reporting but feel a bit lost on how I should be reporting my most recent situation on my 2022 return. Perhaps someone can offer some advice or I may have to go and hire an accountant if I can’t figure this out.
Scenario: my wife and I co-own a house, and have a mortgage together on the property. Last year we refinanced our mortgage and withdrew 400,000 from our house and increased our mortgage by that amount with the intent to invest the money in interest bearing accounts and to make money. At the start of the year our interest income was higher than our mortgage expense because we had a very good rate. However we are on variable, and as you know mortgage rates went through the roof this year, which has put us in a neutral(ish) or possibly a loss position overall for 2022 in terms of borrowing to invest for this lump sum.
We have since put the lump sum amount of 400,000 back on our mortgage (no longer borrowing to invest going forward) but for the 2022 tax year I have to figure out how to report all this. We had a reasonable prospect for earning income when we withdrew and borrowed the money and started trying to invest it hence the “borrowing to invest” strategy.
I’m hoping some of you are familiar with this.
My questions really are surrounding how I report the income from this and how I deduct expenses etc. as a married couple. I suspect this would be a lot simpler if it were just me having to report this as a single person without joint accounts, but that’s not the case.
As I said above, the mortgage and property/source of the money is 50/50 between me and my wife. We both had every intention of this being a totally joint venture. During this year we would move the 400,000 around between different high interest accounts to earn income and some of the accounts would be opened in my name and some of them were in my wife’s name. So, for 2022, we will have several different T5 slips, some under my name and some under my wife’s. Actually, aboit 80% of the overall T5 income will be under my name, and 20% under my wife.
However the interest expense amounts would be pulled and determined via our jointly held mortgage and whatever the interest costs were for us to borrow the 400,000 while we invested it. I’m realizing now we should probably have put all of the borrowed funds into jointly held accounts, but hindsight is 20/20.
Am I able to just add up all the interest earned from both of us, over all our T5’s for 2022 , subtract our total interest expenses (that would be from our jointly held mortgage) and divide it 2 to report half of the profit/loss on each of our respective returns? Or is it more complicated than that? I regret not setting each of these investment accounts up as joint accounts because now we have to deal with several individual T5’s that make it seems like we aren’t doing this investment together with shared interest expenses.
I’ve heard about attribution rules but not sure how it affects my specific situation given we are going to have individual T5’s showing individual income earned but it was really meant to be a joint venture with shared profit/loss. I don’t want to misreport this if possible.
Hope this makes sense to someone out there (fingers crossed). Happy to clarify anything further if necessary since I probably inadvertently missed some key details.
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