To know if the S corporation is the best choice of entity for your business, first you need to consider three advantages and nine disadvantages. Next, you need to take the S corporation advantages and disadvantages that apply to you and get a bottom-line number comparison with your second choice for an operating entity. In this way, you can make a logical choice, knowing that your best choice will stay with you for a number of years and let you pocket more after-tax cash while you sleep better at night.

Do you operate your business as a corporation, an LLC, or a proprietorship? Your choice of entity impacts a variety of tax deductions, and now the cell phone creates a win for the corporate owner and a loss for the proprietorship and the single-member LLC.

If you incorporate your personal service business, you face the personal service corporation tax rates, where tax brackets do not exist and the 35 percent flat-tax rate applies.

Tax law makes it hard for the owner of an S corporation to win deductions for his health insurance. First, the corporate-provided health insurance is not a tax-free fringe benefit for the owner. Second, the S corporation has to pay for the health insurance or the owner will suffer a loss of tax deductions. Third, the S corporation payment for the health insurance will produce wages either exempt or nonexempt from FICA and Medicare taxes. This article shows you how to make the three tax deduction rules work for you.

Is your business entity the best tax-deduction business entity for you? Do you need liability protection? How do the different entities produce different tax deductions? If you are looking for answers to these questions, this article is for you. Also, the article contains one sure way to select the best business entity for you.

Many small businesses underutilize tax deductions for de minimis fringe benefits. The beauty of the de minimis classification is that the business gets the tax deduction and the employee gets the benefits tax-free. This makes for happy owners and employees.

Learn how you can qualify for a tax refund when you pay the “nanny tax” on the wages that you pay your nanny. For the most part, you want to qualify for the child and dependent care credit because the dependent care assistance program discriminates against the one-owner or husband-and-wife-owned business.

To get a tax deduction for your yacht, use it for business travel and avoid the entertainment facility rules. If you run afoul of the entertainment facility rules, you have one small hope. To maximize your deductions, you want more than 50 percent business use and knowledge of the luxury water transportation tax deduction limits.

The defined benefit retirement plan might be your choice of retirement plans if you are age 50 or older and your business earns a healthy income.

This is part 4 in our series of articles on retirement plans for the one-owner or husband-and-wife-owned business. Here we explain the solo 401(k), which permits the largest deductions of the defined contribution plans. The solo 401(k) has unique advantages when your income fits this profile.

The SIMPLE-IRA may be the best retirement plan for the modest-income business owner. And, as you would expect from its name, the SIMPLE-IRA is easy to understand and implement. However, there is one very unusual exception. The SIMPLE-IRA has a current-year October 1 deadline for having the plan in place. That’s 12.5 months earlier than the deadline for a SEP.

Part 2 of the divorce series of articles covers your retirement plans and IRAs. Your goal when giving a little or a lot of your retirement plan to your ex is likely to be that he or she who gets the cash should pay the taxes. To make the taxes follow the money, you need specific words in the right divorce documents. If you fail to put the words in the right place, you can give the cash to your ex and double whammy yourself by paying taxes and penalties to the IRS.

This is the first in a series of articles on retirement plans for small-business owners. In this first article, you learn the basics. Why should you have a retirement plan? When should you start contributing to your plan? What types of plans are available to you? Regardless of the type of business entity—proprietorship, LLC, S corporation, or C corporation—this article gives you the basics you need for a quality retirement plan.

The new under-age-27 health insurance coverage grants windfalls, pitfalls, and planning opportunities.

Tax law creates trouble for selected fringe benefits that the S corporation gives to a more than 2 percent shareholder. The loss of benefits and accompanying complications are factors to consider in the selection of the S corporation as your choice of business entity.

The health savings account (HSA) offers the opportunity to save on insurance costs and create an investment nest egg. To learn how the HSA could work for you, do some easy arithmetic, like we show you in this article.

Do you provide supper or other meal money when you require your employees to work overtime? If so, is the meal money a tax-free fringe benefit or is it additional W-2 compensation to the employees?

Under the right circumstances, you can provide tax-free lunches to your employees. That’s nice. But what about you? How do you, the business owner, qualify for this tax-free fringe benefit?

The Small Business Jobs Act of 2010 spends $12 billion on small businesses, hoping to add a little stimulus to this economy. Make sure you are getting your fair share of this stimulation.

Many one-owner and husband-and-wife-owned businesses opt for discriminatory health insurance plans for their businesses. The new health care law eliminates that discrimination for new plans but allows grandfathered plans to continue as before.

You can use the transportation fringe benefit in lieu of wages. In fact, you can ask the employee to take a pay cut equal to the transportation fringe benefit. Amazingly, this swap of a pay cut for the transportation fringe benefit works out to give the employee an after-tax cash raise in pay and it puts cash in your pocket too.

Learn how to calculate the tax deduction when you sell your business car at a loss—the most likely result.

You can use a Section 127 education plan to obtain tax benefits for yourself (or your corporation) while you help your grandchild through college or other learning.

The Heineman case gives a roadmap to how a husband and wife might deduct the cost of attending a board of directors meeting where they are the only participants. Using the principles enunciated in Heineman, husband-and-wife corporate owners will find deducting the out-of-town board meeting easier than deducting board meetings that occur in town.

Most entertainment deductions are cut by 50 percent when you complete the tax return. Tax law grants a number of exceptions to the 50 percent cut. One exception eliminates the 50 percent and grants a 100 percent deduction to the party, facility, or entertainment that is primarily for the benefit of employees.

This new law requires that you look at your retirement plans through new eyes. Caution is one watchword here. You have much to consider, including how to obtain a strong rate of return on your retirement assets and factors outside your control like the pension bailout of the airline industry. With the new rules, the 401(k) looks better and better, especially if you have employees.

When the husband and wife work together in the business, but report that business on one Schedule C, they create a tax problem for themselves. Is this a partnership or joint venture where both husband and wife have earned income subject to self-employment taxes? You can avoid this problem by hiring the spouse not reporting on a Schedule C. You then can avoid payroll taxes on the wages to the employee-spouse by making the compensation non-W-2 income.

The more than 2 percent owner of an S corporation may not benefit from a fringe benefit like corporate paid health insurance. Further, this owner-employee is not “self employed” for purposes of deducting self-employed health insurance on page 1 of IRS Form 1040. This leaves the more than 2 percent owner with only one IRS approved method for gaining the maximum deduction from health insurance.