If you are currently renting your office, you should consider buying it. When your business purchases your office, you avoid most of the tax law hardships imposed on the purchase of a rental property. Use the Rent/Buy Office Analyzer, a program included in your subscription to this newsletter, to see the answers to all the qualifying questions. It also puts everything into numbers you can understand, the biggest of which is your “annual compound profit.” This is huge.

Take advantage of the government stimulus package in 2008. You need to buy and place in service a business vehicle, business equipment, or a business-related building before the end of the year. Generate fifty percent bonus depreciation, up to $250,000 Section 179 expensing, or an $8,000 increase in first-year luxury car depreciation.

Just as it has standard mileage rates, the IRS has standard per diem rates for daily travel costs. There are situations where you might benefit from the mileage rates and the travel per diems. This article explains how the per diem rules work for you as a self-employed taxpayer, and gives you the ability to make an informed decision on whether or not to use the per diem rates.

After buying stock with incentive options, many choose to gamble with the capital gains treatment. By holding on to the stock for one year, one can save money with the AMT. But, when the dot-com bubble burst, many people lost a lot of money with this gamble. Read about this, and how the government is now bailing them out!

The big $700 billion bailout is right in your face, but there’s more. There are also billions of dollars in side bailouts, including the preferred stock bailout, which helps out owners of preferred Fannie and Freddie stock. Only some financial institutions benefit though, you don’t.

Learn about Gary Larson’s legal fight to deduct his business gas mileage. His logs ended up satisfying the court, but you can do better to avoid what he went through – by keeping good records! Also, take a look at Tax Diary System. This training tutorial gives excellent tax record-keeping tips, whether or not you use this system.

You may not deduct any home expenses when you rent office space to your employer. This is the law. However, you can avoid this law and get additional tax benefits by following our outline on how to deduct a home office for your corporation. Do it right and avoid a red flag.

There are two types of bad debts: business and nonbusiness. Nonbusiness bad debts are deductible in the year the loan is worthless. A business bad debt is deductible either in the year it becomes worthless or to the extent you can prove its decline in value. This is far easier. But, you need to prove your writeoff to get the deduction. We’ll show you how.

Buying the vehicle you lease destroys any opportunity to claim Section 179 expensing.