Owning a home is expensive, but it comes with one of the most valuable tax breaks available: the home mortgage interest deduction.

This rule lets homeowners deduct the interest they pay on their home loans, lowering their tax liability and reducing the amount they owe to the Internal Revenue Service in a given tax year. If your income is low and your deductions are large, it could reduce what you owe to the IRS to zero.

However, how much you can save depends on your loan size, interest rate and where you are in your repayment schedule. For a median-priced home of $419,200 with 20% down and a 6.8% interest rate, that adds up to more than $20,000 in annual interest costs in the early years of the loan.

There is a catch though: To qualify for the tax break, you need to itemize your deductions, which only about 10% of tax filers do, according to TurboTax.

Most taxpayers take the standard deduction instead — a set amount the IRS lets you subtract from your income. For the 2024 tax year, the standard deduction is $14,600 for single filers and $29,200 for married couples filing jointly.

To benefit from itemizing, your total eligible deductions — including mortgage interest, property taxes, charitable contributions and state and local taxes (SALT) — need to exceed the standard deduction.

Most homeowners who pay interest on a home loan can use the mortgage interest deduction. There’s no income limit to qualify, but how much you can deduct depends on your mortgage size and when you got the loan.

For mortgages originated after Dec. 15, 2017, you can deduct interest on up to:

• $750,000 of mortgage debt if you’re single or married filing jointly
• $375,000 of mortgage debt if you’re married filing separately

For older mortgages — originated on or before Dec. 15, 2017 — the limits are higher:

• $1 million of mortgage debt if you’re single or married filing jointly
• $500,000 of mortgage debt if you’re married filing separately

The mortgage interest deduction applies to a range of loans, including traditional mortgages and other financing. Eligible loans include:

• Primary and secondary mortgages: Loans used to buy a first or second home, as long as the home is collateral for the loan. To qualify, your primary home must be your main residence most of the year and you need to spend some time in a second home.
• Home equity loans and lines of credit (HELOCs): Interest is deductible only if the funds are used to buy, build or improve the home that secures the loan, according to the IRS.
• Refinanced mortgages: Interest is deductible as long as the new loan doesn’t exceed the original mortgage balance, unless the additional funds are used for qualified home improvements.

You can also deduct interest on mortgage points, which are fees paid to lower your interest rate, as long as your loan falls within the applicable limits.

However, the mortgage interest deduction does not apply to mortgage principal payments, down payments or mortgage insurance premiums.

To claim the deduction, you’ll need to itemize your deductions on IRS Form 1040 Schedule A. Fortunately, most tax software can walk you through the process to help you get the most out of your savings.

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What’s in short supply for just about everyone these days? A sense of control and influence. 

Things might seem like they’re increasingly out of our hands, impossible to understand let alone alter. But the truth is that you can have more influence — at least in your immediate circles — with just a few words.

I’ve been studying how influence works for 30 years, and even wrote a popular book about it: “Leading from the Middle: A Playbook for Managers to Influence Up, Down, and Across the Organization.” 

Here are six phrases that will give you more influence over people — both at work and in life. 

Everyone likes praise. But it becomes influential when you give a special brand of praise I call “informed encouragement.” That is, encouragement that’s backed up with specific reasons and rationale.

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For example, you could just say “Great job!” to your child. Or you can say, “Great job! You worked hard studying for that test, tackling material that didn’t come easily. You persevered and learned a lesson about overcoming obstacles.” 

The specificity gives the praise credibility and power. When the recipient understands what they did well, sees why it matters, and knows that you notice and appreciate it, they’ll be more motivated to do it again.

One of the easiest ways to have more influence is to truly listen. Think of how drawn you are to someone who’s really attentive, and how frustrated you feel when you know they’re not. 

As a listener, you have two goals:

1. Understand what’s being said.
2. Show the other person you’re interested, engaged, and invested in them and what they’re telling you.

You accomplish all of this by asking questions and prompting them at the right moments to “tell you more” (or asking, “What happened next?” or, “How did you feel about that?”).

As you listen, use acknowledging rather than discounting language. For example, instead of saying, “Oh, it’ll be okay,” try something like, “I hear you, sounds like you’re frustrated with your husband’s behavior right now.” 

By using validating, empathetic language, you’ll make people feel heard rather than dismissed. You’ll build the trust it takes to earn respect and influence.

The key here is the “er,” a subtle but powerful word change. I’ll explain. Influence is sometimes about appealing to people’s desired identity. For example:

• Don’t ask people to help, ask them to be a helper.
• Don’t ask them to lead, ask them to be a leader.
• Don’t ask them to listen, ask them to be a listener.

You’ll get a “yes” far more often. After all, who wouldn’t want to be thought of as a helper, leader, or listener? These are all identities we’d love to be associated with. 

This language swap also works to discourage undesirable actions. In one psychology study, participants were given the opportunity to claim money they weren’t entitled to. Some were instructed, “Please don’t cheat,” and others, “Please don’t be a cheater.”

Those who heard the latter — who were instructed with an appeal to their identity — showed no evidence of cheating because the experimenters had invoked “people’s desire to maintain a self-image as good and honest.”

The key here is “you have.” This is about helping people feel ownership of ideas, and motivating them to move forward. It’s a subtle form of influence, but it works. Think about it: Would you be more excited to work on someone else’s idea, or one you came up with? No contest. 

Let’s say a coworker shares an idea you were thinking about too, something you’d really like to implement. You know you’d need your peer’s help to make it happen. You could try to wrestle credit away from them and make them less inspired to help, or you can say, “That’s a good idea you have. Let’s run with it.”

Just like that, you’ve linked your agenda to their agenda. 

Notice I didn’t say, “Can I get your help?” Seeking advice is far more influential.

People often feel flattered that you value their opinion and expertise and because you’re asking for their advice, they’ll try to see things through your eyes. They’ll often become your supporters as a result, because now they’ve invested in you by sharing their wisdom. 

This is about supporting the people around you as you’d like to be supported, and understanding human nature to trigger good will and reciprocity. 

Offering to help someone with something that’s important to them — and, crucially, following through to make good on your offer — makes them more likely to want to help you with something that’s important to you down the line. 

Scott Mautz is a popular speaker, trainer, and LinkedIn Learning instructor. He’s a former senior executive of Procter & Gamble, where he ran several of the company’s largest multi-billion-dollar businesses. He is the author of ”The Mentally Strong Leader: Build the Habits to Productively Regulate Your Emotions, Thoughts, and Behaviors.” Follow him on LinkedIn.

Want to earn some extra money on the side? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Start a Side Hustle to learn tips to get started and strategies for success from top side hustle experts. Sign up today and use coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 30% off $97 (+taxes and fees) through April 1, 2025.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has some advice, and he says that nearly everyone would benefit by following it: Get an AI tutor.

“I have a personal [artificial intelligence] tutor with me all of the time. And I think that feeling should be universal,” Huang told journalist Cleo Abram’s YouTube interview show “Huge Conversations,” in an episode that aired last month.

That’s a virtual tutor powered by AI, not a human who can teach you how to use AI more effectively. “If there’s one thing I would encourage everybody to do, [it’s] to go get yourself an AI tutor right away,” said Huang, whose company makes computer chips that have helped power recent AI tech advances.

Huang’s preferred tutor is Perplexity’s AI-powered search engine, which he called a “really helpful” tool in an interview with the Bipartisan Policy Center last year. He uses it daily to learn about a multitude of subjects, including digital biology, he added. The search engine, like many other generative AI tools, offers users both free and paid subscription options.

Other AI platforms are designed to act more specifically as tutors, like free tutoring service Sizzle and Khan Academy’s Khanmigo AI tutor, which costs $4 per month.

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″[AI programs can] teach you things — anything you like — help you program, help you write, help you analyze, help you think, help you reason,” Huang told Abram. “All of those things [are] going to really make you feel empowered and I think that’s going to be our future.”

AI tools come with caveats. They still frequently make factual errors, and experts say you should only use them to help your work — not to do your work for you. Huang uses his favorite AI tools to write the first drafts of his own work, he said at a Wired event last year.

He’s hopeful, however, that within the next 10 years, the technology will help most people learn more easily and quickly in nearly every kind of daily setting, he told Abram.

“I think that [in] the next decade, intelligence — not for everything, but for some things — would basically become superhuman,” said Huang, adding: “We’re going to become superhumans — not because we have super[powers]. We’re going to become superhumans because we have super AIs.”

Huang does have a vested interest in preaching AI’s value, and the technology’s growing popularity could be a double-edged sword. Roughly 75% of Americans worry that the tech will eventually result in fewer jobs for humans, according to an August 2024 Gallup survey. AI could automate roughly half of all human “work activities” by 2030 at the earliest, according to a 2023 study from consulting group McKinsey.

AI will indeed help employees do their jobs more efficiently, but it’ll be a temporary boon, current Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman wrote in his 2023 book “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma.”

“They will make us smarter and more efficient for a time, and will unlock enormous amounts of economic growth, but they are fundamentally labor replacing,” he wrote, adding that AI’s spread “will be hugely destabilizing for hundreds of millions who will, at the very least, need to re-skill and transition to new types of work.”

Perhaps predictably, Huang disagrees. As Nvidia’s CEO, he’s surrounded by thousands of smart employees, “and yet it never one day caused me to think, all of a sudden, ‘I’m no longer necessary,’” he said. It “actually empowers me and gives me the confidence to go tackle more and more ambitious things.”

The same logic applies to AI, he said: “Suppose now everybody is surrounded by these super AIs that are very good at specific things … What would that make you feel? Well, it’s going to empower you. It’s going to make you feel confident.”

Want to up your AI skills and be more productive? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Use AI to Be More Successful at Work. Expert instructors will teach you how to get started, practical uses, tips for effective prompt-writing, and mistakes to avoid.

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This story is part of CNBC Make It’s Six-Figure Side Hustle series, where people with lucrative side hustles break down the routines and habits they’ve used to make money on top of their full-time jobs. Got a story to tell? Let us know! Email us at AskMakeIt@cnbc.com.

Before Krista LeRay launched her side hustle, she spent six hours painting a single 4-inch by 4-inch cotton canvas with a fine-tipped paintbrush at her kitchen table.

“I would wake up and paint the entire day until 2 a.m.,” says LeRay, 33. “My pinky went numb from holding a fist [around the brush] all day long.”

The result: a canvas ready-made for needlepoint, a craft that’s essentially paint-by-numbers for embroidery. Needlepoint was LeRay’s college hobby, and after picking it back up during the Covid-19 pandemic, she decided to try selling her designs on the side.

LeRay spent $7,000 on supplies, using money she’d earned as a full-time lifestyle blogger, and launched a Shopify website for Penny Linn Designs in September 2020, she says. She was unintentionally early to a trend: As the pandemic raged, needlepoint aficionados searched for online canvas sellers, and LeRay was among the first. She announced Penny Linn’s existence on her blog and Instagram account, and her first 500 canvases sold in two hours, she says.

The business has steadily built momentum since then. Penny Linn brought in more than $4.4 million in canvas, thread and accessory sales last year, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. The company was profitable in 2024, with a 36% margin, says LeRay. She has 10 full-time and 24 part-time employees, and a soon-to-open 5,000-square-foot retail location in Rowayton, Connecticut.

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The company’s canvases, now made by a variety of designers, range from roughly $30 to over $100 for each “coastal preppy”-inspired pattern — blue and white chinoiserie vases, bowed sun hats and cursive prints of phrases like, “Your email did not find me well.”

Initially, LeRay worried that the side hustle wouldn’t be worth her time. Despite selling a lot of canvases, it was time- and labor-intensive, whereas she could “post a minute-long Instagram story and make a couple hundred dollars,” she says.

“I was making really good money from blogging. It was my retirement plan,” she adds.

But fashion and beauty posts felt insensitive to her at the pandemic’s peak, and after she had her son in 2022, she felt less comfortable posting her personal life on the internet. She took her side hustle full-time later that year, after it surpassed $416,000 in annual sales.

Here, LeRay discusses whether her business is replicable, how to monetize a hobby and the thick skin you need to run an online business.

CNBC Make It: Do you think your needlepoint side hustle — or any sort of successful crafting business — is replicable?

LeRay: I would say yes to both. I’m definitely a more-is-more type of person. I think there’s room for everyone and everything, especially in needlepoint, because there are way fewer physical stores than there used to be.

There are a lot of critiques online recently about monetizing your hobby. You don’t have to, of course, but if you’re really passionate about it and you have a unique perspective, why not?

Before Penny Linn, you were a successful blogger. What kinds of skills help you monetize your hobbies?

I’m very personable. I know how to connect with our customers online, partially because I am our customer. I know what products to create and how to promote them on social media.

I also have the kind of thick skin you need to run a business. I was picked apart as a blogger, so now I’m able to differentiate between constructive criticism and hurtful criticism.

I give myself 24 hours to be upset. In those 24 hours, I can cry and sulk and eat cookie dough. I can be upset and sad and angry and disgusted and hurt as I want. I talk to my husband, to my mom, to my therapist, to my best friend.

Then, the next morning, after I get a good night’s sleep, I say to myself: That’s behind us. We gave it the attention it needed. Time to move on.

Crafting trends can ebb and flow. Do you think it’s risky to commit yourself to a product that could lose popularity?

Needlepoint’s popularity always goes in waves. I think millennials caught on during the pandemic — we were all looking to get off our phones, away from the news cycle and do something peaceful for our minds. The result of that was a ton of new needlepoint designers.

The great thing about needlepoint is once you get somebody involved — someone who is doing it as a hobby, not because it looks cool on TikTok — they find it hard to put down. That’s why people stitch into their 90s. You can create gifts for your friends, your spouse, your children and grandchildren.

It’s something you can put down and always come back to. Right now, we have a 60% returning customer rate.

Given that embroidery has existed for so long, how do you stand out from your competition?

I remember going to a needlepoint shop before Penny Linn was even a twinkle in my eye. It was heavily marketed to a specific, older generation. When I created my shop, I focused on canvases I would want.

I made some with pop culture themes. I made them younger, fresh and more affordable than when you go into these shops, and they have massive tapestries that cost $1,000 and take forever to make.

I just wanted more accessible projects, like an “Ew, David” sweater, and something to represent my love for New York coffee.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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There are several things former CEO and serial entrepreneur David Royce doesn’t like to see in job interviews.

One is job hopping, which makes him wonder how long a candidate would last at his own company. Another is being overly negative about a previous employer, which makes him wonder how that person would behave internally if they were hired.

What he would recommend jobseekers work on is being authentic and honest during their interviews. “Don’t say anything that’s fake,” he says. He’s not referring to lying about your skills, though, don’t do that either. What Royce means is to not stretch what you’re willing to do within the parameters of the job.

Here’s how that could play out and why it’s in your best interest.

At the job interview, you want to make a good impression. That’s a given. But you don’t want to oversell what you’d be able to do down the line.

Say an employer says it’s typical to work until 8 or 9 p.m. in the role. It’s easy to want to be amenable and tell them that’s fine. “But if you’ve got kids or just different values about how much you want to work,” he says, be honest that that might be tough for you to do.

Instead of “trying to win the interview,” he says, say something like, “I’ve got kids and staying till 8 or 9 o’clock at night is just not really my thing.”

There are multiple benefits to being honest about what you can give to a job.

First, if you lie and tell them you’re open to an arrangement that would be a strain on your day-to-day, it’s entirely possible within six months of taking the job, you’ll be pretty unhappy, says Royce. You might even replay the interview and ask yourself, “was I really honest about who I am, what I want?” he says.

Plus, your new employer will feel the difficulties you’re facing in your output and when you ultimately let them know it’s not working.

If, instead, you tell them the truth about what you can take on during the interview, it’s possible they’ll thank you for your time and say that’s a priority for them. But it’s also possible, if they want you on the team, they’ll be willing to negotiate. They might also let you know about another job in the company or keep you in mind for future roles.

Want to earn some extra money on the side? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Start a Side Hustle to learn tips to get started and strategies for success from top side hustle experts. Sign up today and use coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 30% off $97 (+taxes and fees) through April 1, 2025.

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