Tax Credits from Solar Investments

Tax credits are a powerful tool that can help reduce the amount of taxes you owe. In this article, we’ll explain what tax credits are, identify a few ways they can be used to reduce your taxes and explore why the government offers them.

What are tax credits?

A tax credit is a dollar-for-dollar reduction in the amount of federal taxes you owe. For example, if you owe $1,000 in taxes and you have a $500 tax credit, your tax liability would be reduced to $500.

Tax credits are a significant tax saving opportunity for realized income and salary that you could take advantage of. They directly reduce the amount of taxes you owe and in some sense are similar to coupons you can use to reduce your tax bill.

What are the different types of tax credits?

There are many different tax credits available for a variety of situations. Some examples include the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which is designed to help low- and moderate-income taxpayers, and the Child Tax Credit, which can help parents reduce their tax liability for each child under the age of 17. In addition, the government offers tax credits to incentivize certain behaviors or investments. For example, the Energy Efficiency Tax Credit allows taxpayers to claim a credit for making energy-efficient improvements to their homes. The Electric Vehicle Tax Credit can help offset the cost of purchasing an electric vehicle. There are also many tax credits opportunities offered to encourage more investment in renewable energy sources such as solar and wind among other opportunities.

Why does the government offer tax credits?

The main reason why the government offers tax credits is to provide relief for taxpayers who are struggling to make ends meet and to incentivize certain behaviors or investments that the government views as beneficial to society. Tax credits for lower-income families, for example, help to reduce poverty and provide support for basic needs, while tax credits for solar investments can help reduce dependence on fossil fuels and combat climate change.

Having said that, anyone can take advantage of tax credits and other benefits when investing in solar projects.

How do tax credits work in practice?

Andres is a married small business owner living in California with $1,250,000 of income. He expects to pay $593,026 in taxes this year, including $457,353 in federal taxes and $135,673 in state taxes. As a result, he and his wife can expect to keep $666,974 after taxes. Andres and his wife would like to reduce that tax bill so they can save more and retire early.

Tax savings

Andres invested $400,000 in solar projects. In addition to tax credits, they generate depreciation and an income stream.

In return for his solar investment, Andres will end up saving $663,200 in federal taxes and California state taxes (including tax credits and depreciation). To understand how that is possible, we’ll concentrate on one of the concepts that arises with every tax-advantaged investment: tax credits.

In Andres’s case, he and his wife will earn a credit of $320,000 in the first year. Critically, this doesn’t mean that Andres’s income is reduced by $320,000. Instead, the credit applies directly to his taxes owed, reducing his overall tax liability by $320,000.

Because the credit is applied after depreciation, Andres could write-off 75% of his remaining tax liability using up his tax credits in a single year and can still take advantage of the excess. That’s not the case in this example, but even if it did happen, Andres could apply his remaining tax credits to previous tax bills between 2020-2022 or carry it forward to future years.You can read more about the qualifications and limitations on income tax write-offs here

Depreciation tax savings

Depreciation is the amount of value that an asset loses over time. In the context of tax-advantaged investments, each year’s depreciation is an amount that the investor can write off of their taxable income.

We will not focus on depreciation in this example (you can read more about it here) but all in all, Andres can use depreciation to reduce his tax bill by an extra $343,200.

Conclusion

Tax credits are a valuable tool that can help reduce your federal tax liability. Please do your own research and, where necessary, get help from a tax professional to identify credits for which you are eligible, and then make sure to claim them on your return. With the right information and preparation, you can make the most of the tax credits available to you in 2023 and save money on your taxes.

How can you go about investing in qualified projects? It’s relatively simple: Valur has partnered with nationally recognized accounting and investment firms to facilitate investments into solar projects. We will help you identify the opportunity and choose between different solar investments, visualize the potential benefits, and calculate how much you need to invest to capture the right sized tax credits. From there, we and our partners will help you seamlessly finalize your investment and keep track of the relevant data for ongoing tax purposes.

To learn more you can schedule a call with us here.

About Valur

We built a platform to give everyone access to the tax and wealth building tools of the ultra-rich like Mark Zuckerberg and Phil Knight. We make it simple and seamless for our customers to take advantage of these hard to access tax advantaged structures so you can build your wealth more efficiently at less than half the cos of competitors. From picking the best strategy to taking care of all the setup and ongoing overhead, we make it easy and have helped create more than $500m in wealth for our customers.