Businessmen don’t get to write off their living expenses either, but feasibly you could start a business and become a contractor for your employer so you could write off things like footwear, home office square footage, and a standard deduction per mil driven between two work locations.
Best part is the IRS will never audit you unless they have the staff and they can get more out of you than the cost of the audit (roughly 20k minimum).
home office square footage
Can you not do that as an employee in Canada?
In Australia employees who work from home can either calculate all your actual work from home expenses and deduct that, or use the standard fixed rate (which varies by year, but last financial year was 70 c per hour) which includes utilities and stationary/consumables. With the fixed rate you can still additionally deduct depreciating assets like computers and furniture (proportional to how often they are actually used for work).
If you work from home in the US you can deduct for a dedicated home office. I did it but it didn’t save me a penny tax wise. Not sure if my office is to small or my income to low.
I wrote a free spec script for a charity organization, enabling me to write off ~$50k in charitable donations for putting in a few hours of work.
Everyone should be looking for loopholes and ways to prevent the US government from getting their money.
If OP gets audited, this will not hold up.
The IRS actually already did look it over. They decided (rather arbitrarily) that the script I donated was worth ~50,000 instead of ~70,000 as I was trying to claim. Definitely not a full audit, but they already reviewed it at some level and it passed muster.
They’d be like “hey now, this didn’t cost you that.”
But would not that depend on how OP’s time is valued in this case? OP could argue that their expertise costs $14000/hour ($70000 over 5 hours). I am sure that they would argue the hour cost, I have not clue how the IRS handles something like this.
They don’t let you deduct the cost of your own labor ever.
Yes, but … if you use your own labor to create a product, and then donate the product, you can deduct the value of the product.
As I understand it, technically the “thing of value” is the script itself - because it doesn’t have a clearly defined value you can get away with claiming some fairly crazy valuations.
There’s a very similar tax loophole popular with the wealthy where you get a “great deal” on some slightly valuable art, donate it to charity, get it valued by an “expert” you know, who just happens to think it’s worth many times what you paid, then write that off on your taxes. Basically free money.
Do you know if this expert has to have some kind of credentials? Or could John Smith start a non-profit, Jenny Smithy have James Smithens who is an “expert” say the value (of some object) is more than Jenny owns, have Jenny donate this object to John’s non-profit and then tax $0?
(I know it technically can be done, but do you know if there is some threshold were it will be flagged? Writing of more than you own would be a flag and call for an audit but what about something worth $1000?)
Hmmm…
Let’s do a quick exercise without real numbers. Please let me know if I’m wrong because this is what I thought. If I make 150k and am maxed out on my standard deduction, but then I make 250k and there’s no difference on my standard deduction, I’m not getting more standard deduction. If my wife is a stay at home mom and I make $250k, I am getting more standard deduction now, right?
This is how married taxes work, right? Am I wrong on that? We get different brackets and different rules. I’ve been marred for 7 years and my first year I got all my taxes back because she didn’t work that year. Am I wrong?
No. You’re correct. You would get less money back on your taxes if your wife’s income went up. However, the amount your taxes go up is less than the increase to your wife’s income, so you still end up ahead as a couple. You get the largest individual tax breaks when you have a breadwinner, but the total financial incentive (after tax returns) is for both partners to make as much money as possible.
That said, finances are very emotionally charged and how people should approach their finances depends on how they think about this stuff. That’s why snowball debt strategies work - not because they are optimal financially, but because they play into the psychology of a human paying off debt. With that in mind, I suppose you could still feel incentivized to have a large difference in incomes because of the tax breaks - it just isn’t financially optimal if there is a free opportunity for the lower earner to bring in more money.
Standard deduction is slightly different than an exemption. You’re deducting a set amount (instead of itemizing it, which only makes sense to do if the total is more than the standard deduction, which it won’t be for most professions).
An exception exemption would be removing a portion of the taxable income before it is taxed.
Pretty similar outcome for most people, but still an important distinction.
Edit: fixed autocorrect error
Yeah but even that is sort of a tax on employees
When our business decides how much we can afford to pay someone for a position, the math is always with what that payroll tax is included.
So without the payroll tax we may be able to afford paying someone $25/hour.
With it we may only be able to afford to pay them $22/hour.
It reduces the amount we can afford to pay the employee, even though it’s technically never given to them in the first place it’s money that could have gone to them.
I would love to pay more but that tax takes it out of my hands.
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