With so many people working from home, I am often asked about deducting home office expenses. Self-employed taxpayers may claim a business deduction for expenses arising from qualifying use of all or part of a residence. Employee’s are no longer allowed to deduct home office expenses. To clai…
We are often asked if you can write off hair, makeup and clothes by our real estate professional clients, prospects and colleagues. Makeup and hair are a flat out no! But a uniform with your logo might be ok. Listen in for more.
The IRS allows you to take either your actual costs of driving your vehicle as a business expense(gas, insurance, repairs, etc) or to track your miles driven, and use the standard business mileage rate. You would then multiply your miles driven for business against this rate, and voila, there’s your expense. For 2021 the standard business mileage rate is .56 cents per mile (it was .575 in 2020). You can’t do both actual costs and miles driven as that would be double dipping. For purposes of this blog, we are going to assume you are tracking miles in lieu of using your actual costs. So, lets’ say you drive 15,000 business miles, your expense on your taxes would be $8,400 (15,000 x .56). Easy enough. However, we will now shift over to the question at hand: how necessary is it to actually track this?
The dreaded mile tracking question! While many of our agents are getting better at this, we still see too many who “ballpark” their miles driven. We then get the question: Is that really a big deal? Now, you are asking me, so I am going to go with the law here (of course) and say that yes…
We are NOT going to go into the different ways you can write off your vehicle expenses in this article, never fear, I will do another one on this topic by itself! You need to be tracking your business miles, and we will leave out all the rest for this articles purposes. This is likely your biggest expense, and it is also your most audited expenses (and most loosely tracked). If you are old school, you can keep a notebook in your car and jot down by hand every business mile driven in a pen and paper log.
Congratulations… you’ve passed the licensing test, and you are officially now a real estate agent!!!! Amidst all of your excitement on making this official, you are also likely somewhat overwhelmed with all of the STUFF you have to do to kick things off on the right foot. One of the most common conv
While to some business owners, this may seem like a no brainer, we discover quite a few of our new real estate agents that come in for financial guidance are not actually using a separate business checking account for their real estate business. Now, there are really two types of agents that we speak with…the new agent and the seasoned agent…
Whether you are a seasoned agent who has never gotten the financial guidance you need, or a new agent that is still getting your feet wet, you are running a business. One of you may be making more money or have more transactions every month, but both scenarios above are businesses. You need to start
Real Estate Agents! This one is for you! Are you a new real estate agent? Likely, you have a TON of questions, and are super overwhelmed on the tax and accounting side. This is likely all new to you, and there is so much to think about. In this episode, I touch on 3 easy things you should be doing
One of the most common questions that we get from clients when they have a tax balance due is how do they actually make the payment. Listen in to this episode to hear the ways you can actually pay your tax, and some of the issues clients have along the way so you can avoid a costly mistake down the road when all you want to do is pay your tax.