Search this and you will be told that an average stay of seven days or less puts you on Schedule C. That is wrong, and it is wrong on nearly every page that ranks for it. The seven-day rule is real and it is written down, but it answers a different question — whether your…
If you freelanced as a developer and also built something of your own — a side product, a SaaS, an internal tool you later sold — then for tax years 2022 through 2024 the law said you could not deduct what it cost you in the year you spent it. You had to spread it…
Two provisions in the tax code single out real estate agents by name. One decides you are not an employee — not as a matter of judgement but as a matter of statute, whatever your brokerage tells you to wear or when to be at the office. The other quietly leaves you off the list…
A $90,000 salary is not $43 an hour of contract work. It is closer to $105, and the gap is not greed — it is the things the job was paying for that nobody hands a contractor. This converts a salary into the rate that leaves you where you were. The two numbers every other…
Most S corporation calculators ask for your profit and hand back a salary. That is not a thing anyone can compute. The IRS publishes a list of factors and no percentage, so a calculator that returns a number is inventing it. This one works the other way round. You supply a salary you could defend,…
If you rent a chair, the salon is your landlord. It is not your client, not your employer, and not the company that pays you. You collect from the people whose hair you cut, and the salon collects rent from you. That one fact changes everything about your January paperwork — and it is the…
Every guide to deducting business meals tells you the limit is 50%. For you it is 80%, and the difference is written into the statute specifically for people working under the Department of Transportation’s hours-of-service rules. If you have been halving your per diem, you have handed back a quarter of that deduction in every…
Almost every article about the home office deduction tells you the space must be used exclusively for business. A bedroom that doubles as a guest room is out. A kitchen table is out. If you run a daycare in your home, that rule does not apply to you. You are the one carve-out written into…
Part of what you earn as a notary is exempt from self-employment tax. Not exempt from income tax — exempt from the 15.3% on top of it. The IRS says so in the Schedule SE instructions, and it has said so for decades. The catch is that if you work as a loan signing agent,…
Docusign’s Business Pro plan costs $45 per user per month. On an annual plan it includes “up to 100 Envelopes per user per year.” That works out at about eight sends a month on a plan costing $540 a year, and it is written in the footnotes rather than on the tile. Free tiers are…