Small business owners, independent contractors, and micro-entrepreneurs, lend me your ears! Treat your real estate selling job right, and Uncle Sam may let you keep a few more of your hard-earned Benjamins.
Tax hacks to come; see and conquer this 2017:
By law, we at Properties Online cannot give tax advice, but we do have a few hacks for making your ridiculously complicated 1040-CRAZY journey a little less harrowing:
• Keep things separate.
Shared accounts create complications. Instead, pay every business expense and deposit all income in a separate business checking account. Big bills come before the big check? Use a business credit card, paying charges directly from your business checking account. Keeping all transactions electronic allows you to simply export data to a spreadsheet for taxes later.
• Harvest data more easily.
Ditch the shoebox from hell and stop mining for receipts under your car seat. Take an Evernote photo of every receipt (or screen shot of online purchases) as soon as the purchase is paid, for easy sorting and searching. Correspond social business purchases (lunch, parking, etc.) with a detailed calendar.
• Go the long haul.
Toss your daily calendar on the front seat, logging daily time, addresses, and events, and finally start taking advantage of mileage deductions. At the end of the month add them to Evernote. At the end of the period, you may be shocked to discover how much they add up to.
• Backup your backup.
Copy your calendar into Evernote each month, backing it up to the cloud.
• Know when to farm things out.
Paying a small company in your neighborhood to do all your tax prep work while you’re out selling real estate is likely a far better solution than you re-reading tax prep instructions ad nauseam and searching for loopholes on Google.
Tax headaches from real estate selling endeavors overinflating your calendar? Hack them down to size with the help of Properties Online.