Secret Tax Write Offs for 2020 - YouTube

today we're going to talk about tax tips and tax strategies

hi everyone Steven Hamilton here with tax time I want to thank The Kwak

Brothers for inviting me out to talk taxes with you guys before we get

started I want you to hit the subscribe button like the video and make sure that

you share it for all of your friends because the last thing we want is bad

tax advice going around so make sure you replace that information with something

that's quality I get a lot of questions about what people can do to help improve

their tax situation so today we're just going to hit about 10-15 points of just

simple little tax strategies that you can utilize to help improve your tax

situation item number 1 for those of you who are working with some company that

are not self-employed you want to make sure you're taking advantage of any

pre-tax deductions that you can so if you have child care that you pay for

make sure you're utilizing your pre-tax childcare benefits make sure you're

taking advantage of your 401 K make sure you're taking advantage of simple IRAs

any of those different deductions that you can on a pre-tax basis that's number

one before you get started in any other investment make sure you're taking

advantage of those ways that will help immediately save you money number two if

you are working for somebody else and your spouse is not make sure you look at

the balance of benefits that you can offer between both situations and we

want to look at entity strategy based upon what benefits we can offer so let's

say we have a health insurance situation that has a very high deductible well for

your spouse's business we may want to look at an entity that allows you to

write off some of your medical expenses on a pre-tax basis so tax planning is

not about incurring expenses it's about taking the expenses that you already

incur and finding a way to make part of that deductible so if you do qualify for

a home office so we'll start on tip number three here if you do qualify for

a home office as a self-employed individual

there's no reason not to take advantage of it it's not a huge audit flag like

everybody thinks the problem is most people don't fill out the form correctly

so you want to make sure you have good quality advice from an accountant item

number four that I want to talk about today for those of you who are working

for somebody else or you have your own corporation that you're utilizing make

sure you take advantage of reimbursement plans if your employer is willing to

reimburse different expenses make sure you take advantage of that make sure

that you are actually submitting your expense reports because the IRS will not

allow you a deduction if your employer would actually reimburse those costs so

that's a very big point and something that I see in audit quite a bit are

situations where someone said well I don't feel like submitting these expense

reports so I'll just claim it on my tax return it doesn't work that way with the

IRS it has to be something that the IRS or that your employer would not have

reimbursed or they did not reimburse that was ordinary and necessary for your

job so let's move on to number five number five is a simple and easy one

take advantage of contributions to an IRA yes there are thresholds where you

may not be able to deduct your contribution to a traditional IRA but in

those situations we look at doing what's called a backdoor Roth IRA where you can

put your contributions into a traditional and then roll those over

into a Roth so make sure that you're taking advantage of IRA contributions in

general if your children are working have them put money into an IRA they

could very easily fund a Roth IRA and if they need the money out of it later for

school they can always pull their principal out tax-free all right number

six number six is one of my personal favorites it is the mega backdoor Roth

the mega backdoor is utilizing your company's 401k plan and putting in

after-tax contributions you can then later roll those after-tax contributions

into a Roth IRA or into your company's Roth for

okay that can allow you to move up a up to a total of fifty six thousand dollars

into your 401k plan or into after tax contributions with a Roth number seven

is home ownership so depending on what state you're in and if you're currently

itemizing or not your home ownership can be a huge benefit for you I've already

talked about home office is a little bit but what we can utilize is your mortgage

interest your real estate taxes or even potentially house hacking if you rent

out a part of your home or if you ran out your home for a couple of company

meetings you could very easily write off some of those contributions or those

payments for that time in the home so as a business owner if I host a company

party at my house I can get receipts and documentation in quotes for how much it

would cost to have that party somewhere else but then I could choose to host it

in my home pay myself for that expense and deduct a hundred percent of that and

then personally I would not have to include that in my income so make sure

you're taking advantage of the different loopholes that you have through

homeownership the next one that I'm going to talk about is business

ownership business ownership is exceedingly important it doesn't matter

if you were driving for uber if you're driving for lyft if you have a

multi-million dollar company business ownership gives you the flexibility to

increase your tax planning now I'm not talking about creating a fake business

there because you have to have a profit motive you have to be intend to actually

turn a profit plus we want to have that extra little bit of income business

ownership will allow you to restructure things for reimbursement policies such

as your cell phone such as business use of your own home it'll allow you to

create your own 401k plan certain types of entities will even allow you to pay

for medical expenses that you might not have otherwise been able to write off

number nine rental property rental property can be one of the best tax

deductions in tax savings methods through appreciation and increasing your

network when you have a rental property your

goal is to increase your net worth your goal is also to hopefully have a little

bit of cash flow but tax deduction wise we can actually create some benefits

that may cause you to not pay tax on that income currently and even

potentially leave that property to your family later on so rental property is

hands-down one of my favorite strategies to utilize my next favorite strategy to

look at is college expenses if you're self-employed you can look at setting up

a potential reimbursement policy then will allow you to write-off up to about

$5,200 of education expenses so you want to look for a couple of different

strategies depending on your employer reimbursing them if your own business

will reimburse them but then the big ones are different education credits

that are available to people there's the American Opportunity Credit for

undergrad there's the Lifetime Learning credit for

graduate school now I'm going to give you guys a bonus tip for number 11 here

finding an accountant finding somebody qualified is probably the best and

biggest tax tip that I will give you it's not just about finding the guy down

the street and talking to him it's about finding somebody that you can sit down

with and spend some time planning an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of

cure we've heard that one a million times the goal is to take the time

before something happens to plan out what we're going to do and how we're

going to achieve tax savings if you already sell a property and the cash is

in your hand I can't help you because you're already going to pay tax on that

but if you call talk to somebody and find someone to help you plan who

understands your situation they're worth their weight in gold so you want to make

sure that you reach out interview ask questions about their education in tax

ask questions about strategies ask about their different comfort level you know a

little bit of time to get to know someone and find somebody who meshes

well with you can really save you thousands of dollars most accountants

work with worldwide we have portals we have

technology I have clients that I've never met in person but I do Skype

meetings with so it doesn't matter where you're geographically located you can

still find someone who is up to date is qualified and can help you thank you

guys for joining me for tax time I want to make sure that you hit that like

button make sure you subscribe and then don't forget to share this video of tax

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everybody and I want to thank the quoc brothers for inviting me over if there's

any questions or if there's any topics that you'd like to see me cover just

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