I have capital gains that I would like to defer taxes on. How can I best do that?
No, you do not have to be an accredited investor to take advantage of the Opportunity Zone incentive; a capital gains tax liability is sufficient. A taxpayer may defer a capital gains tax liability by forming a corporation, partnership, or multimember limited liability company as a “qualified opportunity fund” (QOF), establishing a bank account for the QOF, and then transferring capital gains to the QOF within 180-days days of the event giving rise to the capital gains tax liability.
You can form your own QOF without being an accredited investor, but to invest in a syndicated fund, you'll need to be an accredited investor because of the securities laws and what happens compliance-wise when a fund takes on unaccredited investors. It's possible some of the funds will take a very limited number of unaccredited investors, but I'm not sure it would be easy to find one.
This is dependent on the Qualified Opportunity Fund (QOF) you are looking to invest in. While many QOF's require accredited investor status, there are also many smaller QOFs with Friends/Family type raises that might not have the same requirement.
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