I am also building a new home and the only tax credit that I am aware of (short of turbine power) is the 30% credit for geothermal installation. My electric Co-Op also offers $750.00 a ton credit for geothermal so you might want to check with your utility company to see if they have any rebates. The credits on geothermal make it cost effective for my installation but I wish there was a credit for foam insulation 'cause I have a hard time justifying that cost. Here is a link that might be useful: Energy Star

I was looking for info on what it costs to build a shell and ran across this post. Figured I might as well lend a helping hand. There are a bunch of scenarios here. If you merely intend on building the home and then selling it, you would only recognize the $25,000 as a capital gain. However, you need to document all your expenses very well in arriving at the $100,000 in costs and be able to prove them should you get audited. Whether it is long term or short term capital gain depends on how long the house is held. Your $100,000 in expenses to build the house is your BASIS in the property. The cost of land is also added to BASIS. However, only the cost of the improvement can be depreciated. If you want to rent the property out, then you have to start talking about depreciation, passive activity loss limitations, depreciation recapture, etc. It gets a lot more complicated than I am willing to get into on here. As far as the 2 out of 5 years rule is concerned, Congress just changed this rule to prevent people with multiple rental properties from moving around every couple of years to shield $500,000 in capital gains for married couples. Again, talk to a CPA in your area about this. If you weren't all the way across the country from me, I would offer you my services. Good luck.

"I used to work from home but on the advice of our CPA did not claim a deduction for my office. The square footage / usage figures were almost insignificant as a percentage of the total, and he said---which I'm sure you already know--- that those deductions are red flags for IRS auditors." My former CPA gave me the exact same advice, so for many years, I didn't. This year, I decided to see how big a deduction I was giving up and how much of a tax impact it had -- NOT enough! So I took it out, even though I'm clearly entitled to claim it.

I sure did not overlook that one. We built a new home last year and the builder charged us sales tax! I was holding my breath to see if Congress was going to renew the deduction.