If you’re rich, this is good and noble accounting. If you’re poor, this is tax evasion.
You have to have enough income and deductible expenditures to where your itemized deductions would be greater than the standard deduction of $24K, which will not be the case for the overwhelming majority of people
Even so. Doing well for themselves middle class American: tax evasion. The rich: well they’re just really smart business people and we should worship them!
If I were an IRS agent, I’d just hang out on these forums and start sending people catfishing messages.
An IRS agent like you will lose your job on Jan 20
I know, but they’ve had so much time to do it.
Sometimes I give them silly advice. Not anything that would actually cause a problem, but just saying they need to find a certain stamp for the document to be valid or whatever.
You see US tax law is so complicated and I know so little about it that I don’t know if this would work or not. I’m guessing somehow not unless you’re rich.
Many business owners that I know do a lite version of this. Going out to eat? Discuss work for 5 minutes, then you can call it a business meeting and avoid paying taxes on the meal. Driving to and from work? Gas is a write off. Buying supplies for the office? Tax free, and maybe some of the supplies make it home with you.
That’s fraud. The 5 minute business discussion can be written off, the remaining (let’s say) 55 minutes cannot. Maybe it differs where you live, but where I do only travel between work destinations can be written off, so home to work doesn’t count. Buying supplies for the office is a normal and valid expense, taking them home is theft and/or taxable
Last I checked in the US, the time wasn’t a factor. You only get to write off 50% though - I think the assumption is that you would have had to feed yourself anyway and the extra 50% is the cost of doing so in a restaurant or for the other party’s meal.
They’re simply talking about what people do and probably usually get away with. I hope no one is reading a comment like that (or yours) on the Internet and then changing how they file their taxes…
Oh yeah, I probably should have specified that it’s not legal, just common practice. Tax fraud ain’t anything to fuck around with.
Yeah if you own a small business, learning what you can write off is crucial. It takes a lot of the pain out.
But you’ve still gotta have an actual business XD
yeah and a business is not allowed to not have revenue for over a certain period of time.
Step 1: Use credit card.
Step 2: Get a loan to pay the credit card off.
Step 3: Get another loan to pay that one off.
Step 4: Get another credit card.
Hilariously, that does work for a while. The more unused credit you have, the better your credit. You would think having a half dozen credit cards hurts your credit, but nope. It’s the opposite.
Opening them will hurt your credit for a short while, but moving debt from 0% interest card to 0% interest card occasionally will increase your credit. Leaving the old cards open and empty will only make youre credit rating go up. You do not, at all, have to use them to maintain them or increase your credit score.
Eventually you will have to pay, and it’s entirely likely to be the worst time for you as passing the buck with debt tends to lead to building more debt, but it’s possible. Credit is addictive, so they want you to have more of it.
Put the credit cards in different trusts
Write it all off
I know a guy (independent contractor) who formed a 1-man corporation and paid himself out of it as an employee. Saved a ton on taxes.
It’s pretty common to form an LLC for your own, self run business even at one person. The business makes all the money, you pay your “employee” (you) a small amount and you save on taxes. Wife does this, her employee paycheck is like $25k/year.
If you ever have a friend who’s not doing this, tell them to get a good accountant lol
How does this work if you want to take money out? Like give yourself a bonus that’s taxable? I mean legally.
She gets income from two sources: as an employee (“normal” income), and as a business owner. There’s something called an owner’s draw, which essentially lets you take money from the business for personal use, and it gets taxed as personal income (i.e., normal job income taxes).
This is my loose understanding. We have a CPA for our stuff, and she sorted all this out before we even started dating.
That actually sounds really good 👍 Would need to read how this works across the pond, but hoping fairly similar.
I would highly recommend asking an accountants advice, I assume there are similar services for when you file in the UK. Finding a CPA (Chartered Accountant in the UK) is huge, they’ll generally charge more but they can represent you in the event you get audited (had to look it up and confirm it’s the same for UK). Now if you get audited, they have a vested interest in protecting you. In the US they’re often legally obligated to protect you (and themselves).
Never trust anyone or anything. Trust me.
This is like that Seinfeld segment about “writing it off”.
For those not aware, you can typically only write off the taxes you owe to the government, and only in certain situations where that’s allowed.
What does this even mean? Can someone explain?
They’re trying to avoid paying taxes by recreating the absurd Hollywood style accounting, but things don’t quite work like that.
My dad’s friend did this for years, bought his kids a home and “rented” it to them. He was able to write off a lot of repairs/renovations and improvements, while they wrote off their rent money, which was just the mortgage payment. There were some other little things that could be done, but by and large it was very advantageous for the whole family (better mortgage rate too), and resulted in huge savings for them. Dad called it the “set your kids up for life” plan.
He wanted to do it for me and my sister but funny thing is you still need the money to buy the second house to get started…
There is also something you can (or could?) do in Canadian tax law where you could set up your mortgage a certain way and basically write off the interest you pay. It has a name but I stopped doing that research awhile ago and can’t recall. It had some sketchy risks and was definitely “kinda” legal. I am not rich enough to afford a lawyer to make it legal for me…
It’s so simple! /s
Idea stolen from wulrus, but the term is tusk, not trust. Then it work.
