@erdls wrote:
We bought a second home in another city 15 years ago.
The past two years we have lived in the second home due to the availability of more medical services for a series of medical problems.
We maintained our mailing address and voting precinct with the primary home.
There are several problems.
You are calling the 30-year home your "primary home". That seems extremely questionable if the 15-year home actually became your Principal Residence, rather than a temporary absence from the other home.
Even IF the 15-year home became your Principal Residence, there is another rule ("Nonqualified Use") that says you can only exclude 2/15ths of the gain (15 years of ownership; the time it was your Principal Residence was AFTER it was not your Principal Residence). In other words, you could only exclude a small portion of the gain.
In addition to only being able to claim 2/15 of gain from that home, it also would mean that two years of the 30-year home was NOT your Principal Residence. The same "Nonqualified Use" rules would result in that whenever you sell the 30-year home, you won't be able to exclude those two years (if you sold it two years from now, you could only exclude 30/32nd's of the gain because there were two years it was NOT your Principal Residence).
