Sun State Savings

As its June 30, 2010 clos­ing dead­line approaches, the fed­eral home buyer tax credit is back in the news.

Unfor­tu­nately, the head­lines are misleading.

Con­trary to what you may have read (or heard), the fed­eral home buyer tax credit has not been extended past June 30, 2010. At least not yet. And here’s why there’s confusion.

Look at these head­lines from ear­lier this week:

• Sen­ate Extends Date On Home-Buying Tax Credit (Philadel­phia Inquirer)
• U.S. Sen­ate Approves Exten­sion Of Home Buyer Tax Credit (NASDAQ)
• Sen­ate Approves Home Tax Credit Exten­sion (Reuters)

Now, noth­ing above is fac­tu­ally incor­rect, but each neglects a key piece of the country’s law-making process — it takes more than the Sen­ate to pass a law. For a bill to become a law, it must pass the Sen­ate and the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and then it must be rat­i­fied by the President.

To date, we’ve only cleared just one of those 3 steps.

This means that the fed­eral home buyer tax credit has not been for­mally extended. As of now, it’s still in dis­cus­sion.  Ulti­mately, though, if the exten­sion does pass, it’s expected to extend the clos­ing date dead­line for home buy­ers beyond the orig­i­nal June 30, 2010 date into Sep­tem­ber 2010.

Home­own­ers must still have been in con­tract as of April 30, 2010 to claim up to $8,000 in fed­eral tax credits.

Tags: Tax Credit,Bill

This entry was posted on Friday, June 18th, 2010 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Tax Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.