My goodness. I bought a car for $30K back in 2010. I used it for a number of years for personal use. Then in 2018, I started occasionally using it on trips back and forth to work on my rental property. I'd write off that mileage each year as a standard mileage deduction.
Come 2022, I sold the car for $4,000. On Turbotax if you mark off you sold a car you previously used for business use, all hell breaks loose and it becomes impossible to figure out.
For starters it wants to know the Fair Market Value of the car when I put it into use 8 years after I bought it. I came up with a guestimate for that as I have no way of knowing. (I said $8K, though changing this number doesn't change any of my results.)
Apparently, I'm supposed to go back for years 2018-2021 and "recapture" a portion of the mileage I wrote off. I miraculously was able to dig up those numbers. ($592). The thing is, if I change this number up, it doesn't make any difference. (I tried putting in $0 and it said I could claim a loss on the vehicle which didn't make much sense...)
I used my car for maybe 5% business use most years. This last year I used it for 10% of the miles I drove as I sold it mid-year. Turbo tax tells me "If the business use percentage varied over the life of the asset the program can't compute the sale information". So then what the heck am I supposed to do!
Oddly, there is a question called "Did you track the miles you drove for personal stuff" which depending if I click Yes or No, changes the results dramatically. (I know exactly how much I drove for business and roughly how much I drove for each year otherwise.)
So it estimates my car was used 7% for business and I sold it for $4,000 so my biz portion of the proceeds are $280.
One of the help boxes states "You must also report the sale of the other portion of the property in the appropriate section of the program." But it doesn't say where that is?
None of this makes any sense and the turbotax instructions/guide/help are completely useless and nonsensical. They really need to better explain these things. There is no reason they couldn't.
Does anyone have a link to an explainer of how to account for selling a previously used vehicle that only took the standard mile deduction?
