When it comes to depreciation, not all real property is the same. You depreciate residential rental real property, such as an apartment building, over a much shorter time than non-residential rental property, such as an office building. If you have mixed-use rentals, you classify them as residential rentals when a specified percentage of the rent comes from dwelling units.

Stay with family and friends when traveling for business. And then create tax deductions by paying them for your business lodging. You have a choice: deduct the cost of staying at the big hotel downtown, or deduct the cost of staying with your friends or family. Either way, the choice of location does not change the fact that you are on a tax-deductible business trip. The side benefit is that doing this right creates tax-free income for your friends and relatives.

Use the following 10 tax-saving strategies on your S corporation tax return to generate big tax savings.

Here’s a handy-dandy strategy for getting some money to your college student to help him or her pay for school. Have your child engage in an activity that’s not subject to self-employment taxes. If you operate your business as a corporation or your child is age 18 or older, this is a great college funding tool that you need to consider.

When you open a traditional IRA, your custodian usually limits you to plain-vanilla investments such as stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. By establishing a self-directed IRA, you can invest in almost anything. But you need to avoid self-dealing and other prohibited transactions, or your IRA could lose its tax-advantaged status.

When you use a home for both rental and personal use, regardless of that home’s location at the beach or in the city, you run into the tax code’s vacation home rules which make that home either a residence or a rental property. There’s much to know here. In this article, we deal with the vacation home-defined residence classification and make that journey easier.

Download your PDF copy of the 2022 retirement plans desktop reference for one-person businesses.

Lawmakers enacted a special employee retention credit for start-up businesses. The credit is up to $50,000 for the third and fourth calendar quarters of 2021. Does your new start-up business qualify for this credit?

If you operate a sideline business that produces tax losses that you deduct on your Form 1040, beware. The IRS can attack that sideline business as a hobby. If the IRS wins, you lose—and you could lose big.