Don’t claim that home-office tax deduction! It’s a red flag. Whoa! What’s a red flag and who says so? This article debunks the red flag for the home-office deduction.

The rental property tax-shelter game is for those who know how the rules work. Your rental property acts as a tax shelter when you can claim tax deductions for your rental property losses against your other sources of income. To qualify your rental properties for tax shelter benefits, you need proof of hours worked on your rentals. You win the tax shelter test when you (1) pass a 750-hour test, (2) pass a second, more-hours-in-real-estate test, and (3) pass an hours-worked material participation test for each shelter property or group of properties, if elected.

Lawmakers reduced your deduction for legitimate business entertainment meals from 100 to 80 percent in 1986 and then from 80 to 50 percent in 1993. That might be good news. It could protect you from the dreaded Sutter rule, where you could lose all your entertainment meal deductions if you didn’t spend more, or differently, than you spend on yourself. Yes, tax laws can be strange.

You can’t claim a home-office deduction if you also have a second location for your business outside the home. Right? Wrong!!! Here’s why.

How would you like to buy a small business, sell it at a huge profit, and defer the taxes as if you had completed a tax-deferred exchange? You can. It’s not a Section 1031 exchange. But it can give you the same exact tax deferral that you can achieve with a Section 1031 exchange. You find this great benefit in Section 1045 of the Internal Revenue Code.

If you wreck your business vehicle, you will like the involuntary conversion rules that allow you to defer any taxable gain, providing you replace the vehicle within two years. This is true regardless of how you operate your business, corporation, or proprietorship.

As the landlord or the lessee, you get big tax breaks when you can take advantage of a qualified leasehold improvement. We gave you those details last month. But if the landlord and the lessee are tax law-defined related parties, you can kiss those tax-favored benefits good-bye. In this article, you learn who those related parties are so you can avoid the kiss good-bye.