What you owe when nobody withholds it for you. Self-employment tax, quarterly payments, 1099 forms, deductions, and the deadlines that matter.
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…
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,…
There is no form that closes a sole proprietorship. You take the job, you stop invoicing, and the only visible trace is a Schedule C that does not appear the following April. Nobody sends you anything. Which is unsettling, because every article on closing a business describes a procedure — final returns, dissolution filings, asset…
The money you spent getting ready to freelance is deductible. It is just not deductible the way you are expecting. Most of it does not go on your first Schedule C as an ordinary expense at all — it goes through a separate mechanism with a cap, a threshold that removes the cap, and a…
Yes. A net loss on Schedule C lands on line 3 of Schedule 1, flows into your Form 1040 total income, and reduces the tax on everything else on the return — including your W-2 wages. There is no wall between the two. That is the general rule, and for most freelancers with a day…