Thanks Carl. A couple notes: The rental property is not under mortgage and has already been transferred to the LLC.
I understand and have been advised regarding the thinness of the veil we've created; we have tried to mitigate that by keeping all finances as separate as possible (via adding the LLC as add'l insured on all rental dwelling insurance policies, opening business checking/savings accounts in the LLC's name, and putting all utilities under the LLC). We have a $5M personal umbrella policy as well. It's not perfect but something that we chose to do, and felt it was worth it after weighing the pros and cons in consultation with a friend that is a real estate attorney.
I also realize that rental property income is passive and therefore on schedule E. ***My question was whether contracting to my spouse (a non-owner of the LLC) to manage the property, and thereby creating self-employed schedule C income for spouse from management fees, is something to explore to open up some add'l avenues to access tax-advantaged retirement accounts.*** I'm not super savvy with SEP IRAs or solo 401ks or self-employment tax rules but I think deducting the "management expenses" from the Schedule E would potentially cancel out any incurred self-employment taxes and especially if we contributed 100% of the schedule C "management income" to a pretax retirement account.
