Host:Can I claim my Mortgage or other interest expense as a deduction?

Arthur Auerbach: Mortgage interest is definitely a deduction. There are certain other interest expenses that are deductions. Personal interest on Credit cards is not deductible at all. Now some folks, who are listening may have self employed businesses and you use a Credit card for that self employed business to pay for business expenses and you carry a balance on that card. That interest is business interest. That should be deductible on Schedule C not on Schedule A. Mortgage Interest adds up the forms that you get from your Mortgage companies. First, second, home equity lines, couple of things to remember here. There are two lines on Schedule A. One line is where the forms that you get from your Mortgage holders. So you add those up. If you are paying a Mortgage to the person from whom you purchased the house, they took back the financing that goes on a separate line on Schedule A. And the last category of interest would be investment interest. So I borrowed money to buy Stocks and Bonds, for example, when on margin at a brokerage house, that is called Investment Interest. That's deductible only to the extent that I have investment income, that is dividends and interest from the Investment account. So there are categories of interest on Schedule A, the most obvious one is Mortgage interest and please remember to watch the forms that you get from your Mortgage holders, because the first copy of that form went directly to the Internal Revenue Service. So make sure you get that number correctly done because that's part of a document matching program that IRS does.