Capital gain tax rules...

[firefox]

I am planing to rent out my current home for a few years and buy another property interstate and live there. What happens if later I decide to sell it will I need to pay CGT or get full exemption? Or CGT will only apply from the time it will be rent out?
I purchased it in 2006 and was always main residence.
I read on ATO site:

The house in question must be your main dwelling to be exempt from CGT. In other words, you cannot own another property and live in that for a few years, then move back and forth between that and your main residence and avoid CGT on both properties.

# Generally, if you bought a house after August 20, 1996, you must have lived in it when you first bought it (as opposed to having rented it out) to be entitled to a full exemption. This comes under the “Home first-used to produce income” rule.
# On the provison the above two points are met, if you rent out your home for less than six years, you are exempt from CGT.
# Assuming the ATO deems you are subject to CGT, if you hold a property for more than 12 months, you are entitled to a 50% CGT discount.


If I understand this correctly..... up to 6 years CGT free only works if I had one property and then it became rental and I lived somewhere else, but not owning&living in anything else.

Thanks in advance.

 

[marg4000]

You must have first lived in the property to invoke the 6 year rule.

You can only have one PPOR at a time, but you don't have to decide which one it is (if you have more than one property that you have actually lived in) until you sell one.
Marg

 

[RumpledElf]

You can only have one PPOR at a time, but you don't have to decide which one it is (if you have more than one property that you have actually lived in) until you sell one.

That's the best bit. I've lived in both of my houses, but one has had insane CG over the 1 year I've had it and one has had mediocre at best CG over six years, so low I'd only be up for a few $100 of CGT max for the entire period. Guess which one I'll be deciding to pay CG on?

 

[Pat]

Good for you Rumplestiltskin, this is tax planning at it's finest and all done for lifestyle or commercial reasons of course and not for a tax reason.

 

[RumpledElf]

Entirely lifestyle. If I could have sold my old house for $0 CG for $75,000 in the period the ATO allows you to let two PPoRs overlap, I would have been fine. PPoRs are exempt except when they overlap for more than 6 months.

However it has been well over a year now so I have to pay CGT on one house or the other, and I'm electing to pay on the house I've had for almost 7 years that has gone up by $0, not the one I've had for 16 months that has gone up by $130-190k (depending on how you calculate it). There's no ruling that says you MUST pay CGT on the most recently aquired PPoR or the PPoR that has gone up by the most, they let you choose.

If they didn't let you sell your PPoR tax free I'd literally never be able to upgrade to a new house, it would be financial suicide in our situation. You seen how long the wait is for public housing as the *other* option to get out of an area where it is hard to sell a house? Courtesy of our lovely tax system, I get out of a bad area, into a nice sized house as opposed to our current too-small cottage, with an IP or two, totally debt free (since we can't get a loan, debt isn't an option), within 3-5 years, on a < $20k income. Bring CGT into it and we can't do it.

ETA: should add that the house we bought had no cold water, really dodgy power, almost no floors, literally no kitchen, leaky roof, dodgy plumbing etc so the bulk of the 1 year overlap was our sweat equity and waiting for tradies to do the replumb/rewire/refloor/repaint/new kitchen/new carpets so we could move in or rent it (it turned out too nice to rent out *sigh*). Would have been a different matter had we bought a less trashed house ...