Any hobby you have where you someone could reasonably assume you could make money at it can be claimed to be a business and used to deduct expenses from your taxes. Since the Trump tax cut of 2017 you don’t even need to create a legal structure for that business anymore. You just literally fill out schedule C as a sole proprietor.
“Middle class” landlords do this all the time, since they get rent as income they can deduct all their expenses at Lowes et. al., if you keep a garden in the summer and ever sell your produce, even if it’s just one tomato, you can deduct gardening expenses, if you own a boat and take people out on charter you can deduct your boat expenses, etc. (Make sure to follow other laws about this, I don’t know where you live and just came up with these off the top of my head.) I have even heard of people starting YouTube cleaning channels to teach people who to clean, and now you can reasonably deduct expenses for your cleaning products.
Also business expenses are “above the line” so this has nothing to do with the standard deduction like charitable donations and mortgage interest do, those are below the line.
Rule of thumb is there’s some length of time you can report losses before the IRS comes sniffing around so if you’re not filthy rich you may have to deal with an audit, but it’s not illegal to try to start a business and not make money. Word on the street is you can lose money running even a casino and deduct those losses too.
This is not legal advice, go look it up on your own and don’t do anything some random on the internet says
Any hobby you have where you someone could reasonably assume you could make money at it can be claimed to be a business and used to deduct expenses from your taxes. Since the Trump tax cut of 2017 you don’t even need to create a legal structure for that business anymore. You just literally fill out schedule C as a sole proprietor.
“Middle class” landlords do this all the time, since they get rent as income they can deduct all their expenses at Lowes et. al., if you keep a garden in the summer and ever sell your produce, even if it’s just one tomato, you can deduct gardening expenses, if you own a boat and take people out on charter you can deduct your boat expenses, etc. (Make sure to follow other laws about this, I don’t know where you live and just came up with these off the top of my head.) I have even heard of people starting YouTube cleaning channels to teach people who to clean, and now you can reasonably deduct expenses for your cleaning products.
Also business expenses are “above the line” so this has nothing to do with the standard deduction like charitable donations and mortgage interest do, those are below the line.
Rule of thumb is there’s some length of time you can report losses before the IRS comes sniffing around so if you’re not filthy rich you may have to deal with an audit, but it’s not illegal to try to start a business and not make money. Word on the street is you can lose money running even a casino and deduct those losses too.
This is not legal advice, go look it up on your own and don’t do anything some random on the internet says
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