It’s a challenging time for many businesses. Therefore, any help you can get, such as tax incentives and sales tax exemptions, can make a big difference. Unfortunately, these benefits often go unclaimed because businesses don’t know about them or erroneously think they’re ineligible.

Understanding these 4 tax-saving drivers will help you make tax-smart decisions over time, including moving money into tax smart investments and creating liquidity via debt financing. Here's the key drivers that will change how you think about your money!

Before traveling for business, it’s important to know what’s tax deductible. Through 2025, employees aren’t permitted to deduct unreimbursed business expenses, including travel expenses, but self-employed people may deduct business travel expenses on Schedule C.

Real estate professional status allows landlords to deduct rental losses against their regular (W2, business, interest, dividends) income. It's a powerful tax strategy for real estate investors.

But one test to qualify as a REP is to spend more time in real estate than your day job.

So how did a boat pilot with a W-2 job qualify as a REP?

Teachers who are getting ready for a new school year often pay for some of their classroom supplies out-of-pocket. They may be able to get some of that cost back by taking advantage of a special tax break for educators.

Are you in the process of starting a business or contemplating changing your business entity? If so, you’ll need to decide how to organize your company.

This is a relatively important ruling in the courts, so important it might be headed to the Supreme Court if the taxpayer further challenges the ruling.

If you’re an S-Corp owner, pay attention. The IRS is concerned about wages being reasonable because of the payroll tax component. If an S-Corp owner is running an artificially low wage, they are avoiding payroll taxes and are instead taking the majority of their profits through distributions.

The Economic Substance Doctrine is a nifty-little tool the IRS has to disallow certain tax transactions based on intent over form. In those instances, they say those transactions lack “economic substance” and are down purely as a tax-avoidance scheme with no other purpose.

If you use part of your home for storage of inventory or product samples, you can deduct expenses for the business use of your home without meeting the exclusive use test. However, you must meet all the following tests.

Why is this bad advice? There’s two sections of the tax code this will run afoul of - 162 and 262.