How to enter mortgage interest as deduction If I switched primary home?

[ASeeker7]

Here is my case, I live in house A as primary home for first 9 months in 2024, then I bought another house B, and moved into the new house in October (lived for last 3 months of year).

I was trying to rent house A out once I moved out. But unfortunately, I was not able to find a tenant, and the house A was vacant for the last 3 months of the year. 

Since there is no rental income, I cannot claim house A as rental property in TurboTax Online.

Later on, in Deductions and Credits section , I am trying to enter the mortgage interest of primary home. I think the correct way is sum up the interests I paid for house A (the amount in the 1098 minus the interests I paid for this property in last 3 months of the year) and interests paid for house B.  Is my understanding correct? If so, how can I do that in TurboTax Online?

[KrisD15]

You can enter the rental even with no income as long as it was available. 

Yes, enter the interest that was incurred while you lived in each house as Home Mortgage Interest. 

Enter as only one Form 1098 and add the interest from the first 9 months of house A on that 1098 screen as long as none of the loans were home equity or refinanced with cash withdrawals. (As long as all the interest was used to buy, build or improve the homes) 

[ASeeker7]

@KrisD15 

Thank you so much for the quick reply!

I have several follow-up questions:

1. In this case, how should I enter "Outstanding mortgage principal" and "Mortgage origination date"?
2. What should be "Lender name"?
3. For the house A, I think TurboTax doesn't allow me to claim it as rental property, since the number of fair rental days is 0 (per IRS, this number should be >14). What should I do exactly?

[RobertB4444]

1. Outstanding mortgage principal should be based on square footage.  Take the square footage of the rental portion and divide it by the total square footage and multiply that percentage times the mortgage principal.  The mortgage origination date doesn't change.

2. The same as the lender from your 1098.

3. "Fair rental days" doesn't mean days that there was someone in there renting it.  It includes days where it was available for rent and ready to be rented.  Even though no one showed up to rent it if you had the house clean and the ads out then it is available for rent and that is a 'fair rental day'.

@Cangoal 

[ASeeker7]

Thanks for the reply!

So let's forget about the rental now.

l lived in house A for 9 months as primary home, and then switched to house B for 3 months as primary home.

So the suggestion is "Enter as only one Form 1098 and add the interest from the first 9 months of house A on that 1098 screen as long as none of the loans were home equity or refinanced with cash withdrawals."

My question is that if I enter it as only one Form, what should I enter  for "outstanding mortgage principal" (since I have two loans in reality), and for "lender" ( due to the same reason)?  For both loans, their loan amounts are greater than $750k. 

@RobertB4444 @KrisD15