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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