What This Course Does For You

Highlights of Murray Bradford’s Tax Strategies for the Self-Employed Course

Turning Travel Costs into Business Deductions

• Golden rule: Combine pleasure with business
• How on-board training creates a write off for your Alaskan cruise
• When you can deduct the travel weekend
• Benefits to paying your relatives for staying at their homes during business trips
• When the law allows deductions for two places of business, say one in Florida and one in Wisconsin
• How to write off the cost of a cruise to Jamaica without working while on the ship
• What happens to your deductions on a trip when you “try to work” but “fail to work?”
• Big picture of travel rules made easy with easy-to-use flowchart
• Special travel rules for conventions

Secrets of Writing Off Entertainment

• Little known tax rule doubles your entertainment deduction at certain sporting events
• When employee entertainment produces a double deduction
• What would it take to make your beach home or ski condo deductible as a business expense?
• How the hidden business-setting rule creates deductions for golf, scuba diving, and theater tickets
• When the law allows you to deduct entertainment when you pay only for yourself
• How tax law’s “closely-connected rule” can create entertainment deductions for your spouse and children (or other closely connected person)
• Three magic words that make your entertaining at home deductions stand up

New Rules Can Make the Home Office Worth Thousands to You

• The taxpayer-devastating Supreme Court decision in Soliman triggered lawmakers’ taxpayer-friendly rewrite of the home-office rules
• How one new rule makes the home office deduction available to you
• How another new rule allows you to claim a home office that eliminates commuting to your downtown or other out-of-home office
• Simplifying how you prove the home office deduction
• When the corporate use of a home office reduces your chances of IRS audit
• 8 tips from the IRS audit manual to protect your home office deduction
• New rules explain how to avoid taxes when you sell a home that contained an office

Digging Out Personal Benefits from Your Business’s Medical Plan

• The husband-and-wife proprietorship strategy
• Strategies when you operate as an S corporation
• Strategies when you have employees
• Strategy for single taxpayers
• Rules that taint you with your spouse’s employees and what you need to do
• Rules that taint you with employees from your other businesses and what you need to do
• How you might pocket big dollars with a little known law that allows discrimination with health insurance
• How the business reimbursement of medical produces bigger deductions for long-term care insurance and deductions for otherwise nondeductible over-the-counter drugs, medicines, and bandages

New Safe-Harbor Rules Improve Prepaid-Expense Strategy

• Why prepayment can add thousands and thousands to your net worth
• How the new safe-harbor rules work to your benefit
• Extra breaks to the cash basis taxpayer (probably you)
• How to make certain that you are inside the safe harbor

Some Unusual Tax Breaks That You Should Think About

• The one rule that can turn your yacht into a business deduction
• How to qualify your motor home for business deductions as either a portable hotel or a transportation facility
• When the hunting lease can produce a business deduction
• When you should consider incorporating an entertainment facility as a second business
• How to hire your spouse without triggering payroll taxes
• When the rules allow you to deduct commission rebates (in tax-law approved instances, even illegal rebates qualify)

Nuts and Bolts of Section 179 Expensing

• How to avoid recapture and make the expensing benefit a permanent benefit
• New expanded dollar limits produce more benefits
• When expensing can be applied to your spouse’s W-2 income
• How expensing works with a partnership or S corporation
• How special rules enable expensing of a motor home
• How the special $25,000 expensing limit on SUVs works
• A little known method to qualify for expensing when you rent property to your corporation

When hiring your children puts tax money in your pockets without costing your children any taxes

• Tactics for individuals, corporations, LLCs, etc.
• Ages that work
• Picking the rate of pay
• What wages are exempt from unemployment taxes
• What wages are exempt from FICA and Medicare taxes
• How to prove that the child did the work
• Payroll reporting tips to ensure your benefits
• The Department of Labor's new regulations on child employment

Why Cost Segregation Is a Strategy You Need to Consider

• Identifies fastest depreciating property
• Identifies largest up-front deductions
• Can be beneficial after the fact (years later)
• Works best on commercial buildings
• Works well on residential rentals
• Why it’s an unusual opportunity

New Rules Make Antiques Smart Business Asset Choices for You

• The two court cases that made this possible
• Where the IRS stands on this issue
• How to assess your position on this issue
• Qualifying antiques you can depreciate to zero even when they increase in value
• Rules on what makes a qualifying antique
• Why you, the business owner, make a better after-tax profit than the antique dealer

Write Off Thousands More in Vehicle Deductions

• Five often easily overlooked vehicle deductions
• Selecting the best vehicle deduction method
• How not to trash your money when you sell or give your vehicle to a relative
• How this one vehicle mistake costs thousands, even tens of thousands
• When you should use the Section 1031 delayed Starker exchange on your vehicles
• How to take the guess work out of the buy or lease question
• Two common overlooked deductions when you lease
• How the total wreck of your vehicle produces tax breaks

Why the 401(k) Retirement Plan Is a Great Fit for Small Business

• Fly solo if you can
• It’s possible to put away a goodly sum of tax deductible money
• Plans with zero administrative costs
• Plans with little tax hassle
• The one critical component to making your 401(k) do a great job for you
• Why you need to make sure that someone is taking care of the required IRS Form 5500

Easy Steps to Building Tax Records While Spending Little Time

• Successful deductions require the right notes (generally seven words or less)
• One simple tactic that makes your deductions stand up and shout: “I am deductible”
• The magic of your appointment book and auto log
• How to spend very little of your time turning your appointment book into an audit-proof shield for your deductions
• Why the best lawyers, CPAs, and enrolled agents cannot overcome your records failures
• You make the decisions and you keep the records—that’s why you need to know the rules

Why Choosing the Right Business Entity Is Critical to Your Business and Financial Health

• You face a legal system that puts your assets at risk
• You face the tax man who wants your money
• Easy chart helps you identify winners and losers for entity choices
• Five tax breaks that make the single-member limited liability company (LLC) a good choice
• The one and only way to compare the S corporation’s seven disadvantages with its two advantages
• When the C corporation makes sense
• How to deal with the salary issue when you operate as an S corporation
• Why you absolutely need to know the assignment-of-income rules
• When the assignment-of-income rules kill the entity
• Take this special care when you loan money to your corporation
• Little known rules that allow your corporation to reimburse you, the employee, for lots more than you would think
• When the corporate reimbursement reduces the corporation’s chances of an IRS audit

Why You Might Need a Tax Plan to Realize Your Social Security Benefits

• When the law takes your Social Security benefits away from you
• When the law taxes your Social Security benefits
• Entity strategies that help you keep and avoid taxes on your Social Security benefits

IRS Audits—How to Avoid and Cope With the IRS

• How to know who you are talking to and what they know
• When to go naked to your audit (i.e., without your tax advisor)
• Flowchart for getting help
• What you need to know about informants
• Why you don’t want to send your lawyer, CPA, or EA to the audit without you
• 23 Strategies for the audit
• 13 Ways to reduce your chances of an audit
• What to do after the audit
• Nine important rights you need to know

How to Qualify Your Start-Up and Business-Expansion Expenses for Deduction

• Do start-up deductions correctly the first time or lose the deductions (they become capital investments)
• When “thinking about it” expenses qualify as start up deductions
• How to make the proper election
• Special rules for successful and unsuccessful searches for a new business
• Special rules for expansions of existing businesses
• Four absolutes for your start-up deductions

How the Hobby-Loss Rules Apply to Your Business

• To incorporate or not if you might lose money
• How the hobby category can tax your income and disallow your deductions (yikes)
• Three magic words that make the hobby disaster disappear
• Why you should never sign the IRS’s three-out-five-year agreement
• How to put the IRS’s nine profit factors to work for you