My wife and I have a $20k net loss from our rentals. It is my understanding I can 'increase' my deductions on my W4 (to wit, line 4b) to compensate for the expected decrease in taxable income. However, when I use the TT withholding calculator at https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/calculators/w4/ it doesn't seem to allow me to increase deductions from income (?); and when I use the IRS calculator at https://apps.irs.gov/app/tax-withholding-estimator/about-you and I arbitrarily deduct as Alimony our $20K anticipated net loss (Deduct as Alimony bc the IRS software doesn't list "Other AGI deductions". Nonetheless, when I prepare our anticipated tax refund w/o any loss and compare it to a second attempt with an anticipated loss, I received an anticipated refund amount of, say, $5000, as an example. How do I take into consideration the anticipated refund? Do I divide the $5K by the allowable personal exemption amount? This isn't an option bc we no longer have personal exemption amounts... What is the solution of the W4 approach to anticipate additional anticipated deductions? Reason being is I want to decrease my taxable income and increase the "savings" amount into my 401K deduction. It used to be the available approach was to divide your anticipated refund by the exemption amount, but that no longer seems possible.
