By Mary Childs | Barron’s
There’s a new opportunity to combine your love of avoiding taxes and your love of country. Under a recently-clarified provision in the December 2017 tax bill, you can now shelter those gains from taxes for seven years, in designated low-income “Qualified Opportunity Zones.” Just put your money, within 180 days of reaping the profit, into a partnership or corporation with at least 90% of its assets in “property” in a Zone, and hold it for ten years, and voila! You only have to pay taxes on 85% of the capital gains, at year seven, and then pay no taxes on whatever gains your gains generated.
The investment can be stock or partnership interests, or real property like buildings, so real estate and venture investors are stoked. The idea— largely the progeny of the Economic Innovation Group, a think tank co-founded by former Obama adviser Steve Glickman, Napster’s Sean Parker, and CEO John Lettieri—is meant to reconnect the current of money to neighborhoods left behind in the economic growth of the past decades.
