Client Alert
Fractional Art Investing Is Real — How To Advise Your Clients On The Tax Consequences
In mid-November a portrait of a young Vietnamese woman by the artist Gustav Klimt, which was part of the estate of the late Leonard Lauder (the cosmetics billionaire), was sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $236.4 million. It set the record for the most expensive work of modern art ever sold at auction according to Bloomberg. That’s probably out of reach for most of our clients. But what if they could join together to buy an interest in the painting with an entity holding the asset? That’s the idea behind the burgeoning fractional art market. While, in general, the art market has been struggling for a few years, the fractional art market has been expanding. According to the website Digital Original, “Fractional art ownership is no longer a niche concept – it’s a growing investment trend that’s accessible, flexible, and supported by cutting-edge technology.” What, you may be asking, does this have to do with taxes? It may be more than you think for your high-net-worth clients. As a trusted advisor it’s important that you are aware of both the types of investment opportunities your clients may be buying into and the tax consequences.
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Year-End Tax Planning Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA)
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed into law on July 4, 2025, doesn’t reinvent the tax code it refines it. Much like its predecessor, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), it keeps many familiar provisions in play: lower rates, expanded SALT flexibility, and broader deductions. But here’s the real story: While most tax pros are busy memorizing what stayed the same, the planners who will win 2025 are the ones spotting what just became possible. OBBBA quietly opens a handful of powerful new planning windows — each one capable of delivering real, measurable savings for the right client. The key is knowing which changes are worth your time… and which are just political garnish. Below, we’ve curated the most strategic, high-impact moves to make before year-end 2025, the ones that separate the advisors who explain the law from those who leverage it. Most tax pros will stop at what changed. The smart ones will keep reading to learn how to use it.
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Games Industry Lore 101: Basics Tax Practitioners Should Know
When building your book of business, especially small business clients that do the heavy lifting due to their recurring complex tax filings, you might ponder seeking out clients in the video games industry. Salivating at the prospect of capturing just a tiny sliver of that nearly half-trillion market valuation as your social media feeds flood with news and memes from a random indie game you’ve never heard of, you wonder how to attract and retain game developer clients. But there’s several things that tax practitioners should know about how the games industry works, and its innumerable oddities, before diving head-first into taking on game developers as business or individual clients. Ready to press play?
The NIL Tax Playbook
Regardless of where you stand on the issue, student athletes have been able to tap into a new revenue stream since July 1st, 2021. This is when the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) began to allow students to profit from their name, image, and likeness (NIL). Which leads to new tax implications for a group of taxpayers who may have never filed a tax return before. As this has unfolded, it reminded me of taxpayers who were on the forefront of making money online. It was something new, so not many taxpayers or even tax practitioners knew how to handle it. It was real money, but was it really a business? I’ve loved seeing it evolve. Now, right off the back of COVID-19, we have student athletes who are able to take advantage of their online presence and also make money. But the income people were making 20 years ago online is pennies compared to what some students can make through NIL deals. In 6 short years, students have gone from not being able to profit monetarily from their likeness while competing as a student to now potentially making millions.
D&A Planning After the One Big Beautiful Bill Act
After 2021, whether an expenditure was deducted currently or recovered through depreciation often affected timing, but it typically did not create a meaningful advantage from a Section 163(j) perspective. The restoration of depreciation, amortization, and depletion addbacks in the computation of adjusted taxable income (“ATI”) has changed that analysis and created a new opportunity for taxpayers with actual or anticipated interest limitation exposure. As a result, taxpayers should reconsider whether certain expenditures that historically may have been deducted immediately can instead be capitalized into depreciable or amortizable property in order to improve their Section 163(j) profile.
