Archive for the ‘Home Office’ Category
Back to Basics Part XXX – Form 8829 Expenses for Business Use of Your Home
Filed under: Back to Basics, Home Office | Tags: business use of home, depreciation, Form 8829, home daycare, home office, mortgage interest, Publication 587, real property taxes, Schedule C, simplified method, utilities
Leave a comment Originally published in the Cedar Street Times
December 25, 2015
Merry Christmas!
My vision of Santa’s workshop is that it is built into his home at the North Pole. Being that it is quite chilly there, why would you want to leave the warmth of one building to go to another? It is also highly unlikely that he would need a separate office “in-town” at the North Pole. Betting on the idea that it is built into his home, he would certainly seem eligible for a home office deduction.
Whether or not he would use the Form 8829 – Expenses for Business Use of Your Home would depend on his legal structure, however. Is he Santa Claus, sole proprietor? Is it Santa Claus, Inc. of which he is a greater than 2% shareholder employee? Or maybe it is Santa’s Workshop, LLC? If it is an LLC, it is possible it could be a Single Member LLC if the North Pole has community property laws. If that is the case, Santa and Mrs. Claus would be treated as one member and the entity disregarded for federal tax purposes. Well, I suppose that is for Santa and the IRS to worry about! Maybe we should focus on you instead…
If you use part of your home for business purposes, you may be able to claim a home office deduction using Form 8829 – Expenses for Business Use of Your Home. The space must be used exclusively and regularly for business purposes and it must be your principal business location – meaning that it must be the main place where managerial activities occur for your business, and you have no other space where substantial managerial activities occur.
You can claim this deduction as a sole proprietor, but also as an employee, if your employer expects you to maintain an office in your home and provides no other fixed location for you to work. It is best if this type of arrangement is spelled out in your employment agreement.
The Form 8829 is used specifically for sole proprietors filing a Schedule C. If you are an employee claiming a home office deduction, or a partner, or if you are filing in conjunction with a Schedule F for a farm, you must use the “Worksheet to Figure the Deduction for Business Use of Your Home” in Publication 587 to calculate the expenses instead. It essentially accomplishes the same purpose, except whereas the Form 8829 is filed with the returns, the worksheet is not.
The Form 8829 and the worksheet in Publication 587 focus on calculating a deduction based on actual expenses. There is a relatively new simplified method also. It allows you to deduct a flat $5 per square foot up to a maximum of $1,500 a year.
We will now spend some time focusing on the Form 8829 itself. If you would like to read a more in-depth analysis on the home office deduction discussed above, I wrote a three part series on this topic on July 26, August 9, and August 23 of 2013. You can find them on my website at:
https://blog.tlongcpa.com/2013/07/26/home-office-new-option-for-2013/
Part I of the Form 8829 determines the business percentage you will use to apply to the home office expenses you incur. You divide the business use square footage by the total square footage to determine the percentage that will be applied to the expenses.
Home daycare providers have special rules as they are allowed to use the space for both personal use and work use. They have an additional calculation in Part I where they divide the total hours for the year that the space was used for daycare services, by the total number of hours in the year. This percentage is then multiplied by the square footage percentage to finally arrive at the reduced percentage to apply to the expenses.
Part II of the Form 8829 is where you will list all your expenses of maintaining your home, such as property taxes, mortgage interest, insurance, utilities, repairs, etc. The direct column is for expenses that were 100 percent deductible and should not have the business use percentage applied. Perhaps you repainted your home office only. This would be an example of a direct expense. If you had painted the entire house, then you would list it under indirect expense. The business use percentage would then limit your deduction to the relative portion of the home used for business.
A home office deduction is generally not allowed to create a loss on your schedule C with the exception of the portion related to real property taxes and mortgage interest since they would have been deductible on Schedule A anyway. If the other operating expenses of your home office create a loss, that loss is suspended and carried over to future years. Part II has additional lines to handle any carried over losses from prior years as well. The amount of deduction from the bottom of Part II carries over to your Schedule C for deduction on that form.
Part III handles the depreciation expense on your home – basically its wear and tear over time. Depreciation is a use-it-or-lose-it concept, so you are better off taking it if eligible. Some tax preparers incorrectly advise people not to take depreciation expense on their home in order to avoid tax recapture problems when they sell. What they are failing to grasp is that recapture is based on depreciation that was “allowed or allowable.” So even if you do not take the depreciation expense when you were entitled to it, you have to treat it as if you did take it when you sell, and you would still be subject to any of the same recapture taxes. Part III is a feeder calculation back into the depreciation expense line in Part II.
Part IV is essentially the final summary of any carryovers available for the next year.
If you have questions about other schedules or forms in your tax returns, prior articles in our Back to Basics series on personal tax returns are republished on my website at www.tlongcpa.com/blog .
Travis H. Long, CPA, Inc. is located at 706-B Forest Avenue, PG, 93950 and focuses on trust, estate, individual, and business taxation. Travis can be reached at 831-333-1041.
Home Office Part III – How Big is My Deduction?
Filed under: Home Office | Tags: 39-year, business use of home, cable, carryover, daycare, deduction, depreciation, Form 2106, Form 8829, furniture, home office, improvements, insurance, janitorial, landscaping, maintenance, miscellaneous itemized deductions, mortgage interest, repairs, satellite, Schedule A, Schedule C, square foot, taxes, trash, utilities, water
Leave a comment Originally published in the Cedar Street Times
August 23, 2013
Four weeks ago, I discussed a new simplified option for calculating the home office deduction that is effective for 2013. Two weeks ago I discussed the rules to qualify for a home office deduction. In this final installment on home office deductions, we will discuss the standard method of determining your deduction, which will still yield the greatest benefit for most people – especially in high cost localities. (If you missed the prior two articles, you can find them on my website at www.tlongcpa.com/blog.)
The standard method of calculating your home office deduction is done on a Form 8829 or on tax worksheets. It typically starts with a square footage calculation of the livable space in your home, and a calculation of the portion used exclusively for your business activity, to determine the percentage used by the business. You can use a calculation based on the number of rooms in the house if they are similarly sized, but in practice hardly anybody uses this method.
The next step is to gather your expenses and multiply them by the business percentage you just determined. Add up in separate categories your utilities, water, trash/recycling service, janitorial (house cleaner), repairs and maintenance, homeowner’s or renter’s insurance, and any other recurring expenses used to maintain your house. If you regularly meet with clients at your house, you can generally do the same for your landscape maintenance expenses as well.
If you rent your home, you add up your total rent and multiply it by the business percentage. If you own, you apply the business percentage to your mortgage interest and real estate taxes (the balance go on Schedule A). Some people will throw their internet access fees on the 8829, but often a better deduction is obtained by thinking about actual business use versus personal use, as square footage is not a great metric for internet use. You could then put that directly on your schedule C if you run a business, or Form 2106 if you are an employee with a qualifying home office. If you buy furniture or equipment exclusively for your office, that is generally put on a depreciation schedule and often linked directly to your Schedule C or Form 2106 instead of running it through your business use of home form.
The first telephone line into the house is not deductible at all. A second line could be, however. But in that case it is typically a dedicated business line, and you would put that on your schedule C or Form 2106 in full to get a better deduction. Your cable or satellite service is probably off limits for most people since there is such a high degree of personal use and it is an area subject to abuse. Based on facts and circumstances some people may be able to build a case for part of it – such as a day trader that depends on the financial channels, or if you have a waiting area which clients regularly use to watch television.
If you own the home you need to set up the home and and any improvements on a 39-year depreciation schedule (not 27.5 like a rental home – common mistake) and run depreciation deductions through your business use of home calculation (beyond the scope of this article). Many people fail to do this thinking it is a choice. It is not. There is a use or lose it rule, and you are responsible for depreciation recapture taxes upon the sale of the home whether or not you claimed the deduction. So you might as well take it!
Facts and circumstances and reasonableness will generally rule the day as an overarching principle to the application of all of these rules. Technically, if you only painted your office, you can take 100% of the cost into consideration for your business use of home deduction. On the flip-side, if you painted everything but your office, you shouldn’t really take any deduction. In practice, records are generally not kept that precisely, and the dollar figures are not that large, so you often end up applying the business percentage to everything in that category for the year for practical purposes.
Even after calculating the deduction, there is another hurdle you must pass – you cannot create an overall loss on your Schedule C from business use of home expenses with the exception of real estate taxes, mortgage interest, or casualty losses which would be deductible on Schedule A regardless. If you have a loss, the excess business use of home expenses will get suspended and carried over to a future year when your business is profitable.
Employees have a different hurdle since their home office deduction is an employee business expense which is a miscellaneous itemized deduction subject to a two percent of adjusted gross income floor. So if their total miscellaneous itemized deductions exceed two percent of their adjusted gross income, then the excess is an itemized deduction, and if their itemized deductions exceed the standard deduction, then they can benefit!
Of course there are many other considerations that can come into play depending on your circumstances such as separately metered properties, or separate structures, multiple offices in the same home, or different homes, a daycare home office, etc. This article should be enough to give you the gist, but it is always best to consult with a professional to ensure you are complying with the laws as well as getting all the deductions you deserve.
Prior articles are republished on my website at www.tlongcpa.com/blog.
IRS Circular 230 Notice: To the extent this article concerns tax matters, it is not intended to be used and cannot be used by a taxpayer for the purpose of avoiding penalties that may be imposed by law.
Travis H. Long, CPA is located at 706-B Forest Avenue, PG, 93950 and focuses on trust, estate, individual, and business taxation. He can be reached at 831-333-1041.
Home Office Part II – Do I Qualify?
Filed under: Home Office | Tags: accounting, administrative, administrative and management activities, billing, business owner, business use of home, deduction, detached building, employee, employer's convenience, exclusively and regularly, fixed location, home office, making appointments, management, meet clients, meet customers, multiple businesses, ordering supplies, personal use, principal place of business, qualify, self-employed, separate structure, telecommuting
Leave a comment Originally published in the Cedar Street Times
August 9, 2013
Two weeks ago, I discussed a new simplified option for calculating the home office deduction that is effective for 2013. (You can find the article on my website at www.tlongcpa.com/blog if you missed it.) The rules to qualify for a home office, however, have remained unchanged, and still complicated! At the end of the last article I promised I would discuss the basic rules to qualify – so let’s get to it!
The purpose of the home office deduction is to offset the costs of maintaining a dedicated office space in a home related to a business owned by an individual, or in some cases for an employee’s job.
Let’s talk about employees first. Many employees these days work from home, but more often than not, they are not entitled to the deduction because it is their personal choice to work from home. The law requires that the office be for the employer’s convenience – not yours. If your employer does not require you to work from home and provides space for you at the main office which you choose not to utilize, you are generally barred from taking the deduction.
An employer hiring for telecommuting position so it can save on corporate office rent or obtain/retain talent in distant places would certainly be for the employer’s convenience. Or perhaps an employer would like to have a presence in a particular area, so it hires somebody to work out of his or her own home office, and meet clients there, instead of having to rent another space. This would also be for the employer’s convenience. Often, people work a couple days from home, and a couple days in the office. They could be closer to a customer base from their home for appointments, for instance, but then also come to the main offices for staff meetings, etc. Many times, it is certainly convenient for both parties.
The key thing employees would want to have is an expectation in writing from the employer about maintaining and using their own office. Rationalizing in your own mind that the employer is benefiting will not help, even though it may be true. If it does seem the employer is better off as a result of your home office, and your job description does not discuss maintaining your own office, you may want to talk to the employer about changing your job description to include this.
Now let’s discuss people running their own business. In this circumstance, the IRS says the office must be one of three things: 1) the principal place of business, 2) a place of business that is used to meet customers, or 3) a separate structure from the home, but used for the business. If you have a business, and your home is the only office, it is pretty clear you meet one of these three. When someone has an office space outside the home, but also has a home office it gets a little trickier, especially if you don’t regularly meet with customers at your home (occasional use won’t qualify) and you don’t have a detached building at your home.
Digging further into item one you find that the IRS distinguishes your principal place of business from other offices as the place where your administrative and management activities such as billing, accounting, ordering supplies, making appointments, etc. takes place. If you have no other fixed location where you conduct substantial administrative and management activities then your home office would qualify as your principal place of business. For instance, if you were a personal trainer and rented space for you and your staff to meet with clients and use your exercise equipment, but you did all of your accounting, billing, appointment making, etc. from your home office, your home office would qualify as the principal place of business.
For any home office, whether it be for employees or business owners, the office must be used “exclusively and regularly” as an office for that business. The rules are very rigid. You can’t use a room a couple times a year and write it off, even if you did not use it for anything else. It needs to be used with regular frequency, and be substantial and integral. You also can’t double up your living room as an office during the day and a TV room at night. You can’t have a family office where the kids use it for computer games on the weekends, dad uses it to work on the finances in the evening, and then mom uses it as her office during the day and tries to deduct it. People often try to write off the whole guest bedroom which also houses there office, but courts have typically denied this if they have a bed in there and admit to having guests on occasion. Technically, any nonbusiness purpose use disqualifies the space (special rules apply to childcare providers, however).
In practice there is at least de minimis personal use of virtually every office space, and at the end of the day, it is quite difficult to know if someone uses an office for some personal purposes. However, if the auditor shows up and the kids are playing games on your computer and your in-laws’ suitcases are next to the bed in your “office,” I think you will have a problem! Stick to the spirit of the law, carve out a dedicated space, and everyone will be happy. Keep in mind that you don’t have to use an entire room, but you can define a portion of a room as the dedicated space, write off closet space for storage, etc.
If you have multiple businesses, you can use the same space for all of them, but if one business fails to qualify, then it is seen as personal use and thus none of the businesses qualify to claim the home office deduction. (Note, in calculating the deduction, you would allocate the allowable deduction to the businesses – you would not get a double or triple deduction for the same space.)
In the final installment on home offices in two weeks, I will discuss the normal method of calculating the home office deduction and what expenses generally qualify.
Prior articles are republished on my website at www.tlongcpa.com/blog.
IRS Circular 230 Notice: To the extent this article concerns tax matters, it is not intended to be used and cannot be used by a taxpayer for the purpose of avoiding penalties that may be imposed by law.
Travis H. Long, CPA is located at 706-B Forest Avenue, PG, 93950 and focuses on trust, estate, individual, and business taxation. He can be reached at 831-333-1041.
Home Office Part I – New Option for 2013
Filed under: Home Office | Tags: $5, 2013-13, 300 sf, 300 square feet, allowed or allowable, business use of home, carryover, carryovers, depreciation, exclusion, garbage, home office, itemized deductions, maintenance, mortgage interest, office-in-home, property taxes, recapture, repairs, Rev. Proc., Revenue Procedure 2013-13, safe harbor, section 121, self-employment, standard mileage deduction, utilities, water
Comments (2) Originally published in the Cedar Street Times
July 26, 2013
In January, the IRS issued Revenue Procedure 2013-13 which discusses a new option for calculating the home office deduction. (You may want to clip this article and put it in your tax file as a reminder.) Instead of tracking the actual expenses of operating your home office such as water, utilities, garbage, repairs and maintenance, depreciation, etc., you can now elect a safe harbor $5 per square foot of qualified office space, up to 300 square feet ($1,500). It is kind of like taking a standard mileage deduction on your car instead of tracking gas and repair receipts, and calculating depreciation expense. Unlike vehicles, however, you can switch methods back and forth from one year to the next.
There are a few interesting provisions that will make it a good option for some people, and a bad option for others. In other words, when preparing your return you will need to analyze the short and long term impacts, and determine which method is best each year. Since the $5 per square foot figure is not adjusted by region or for inflation, individuals living in high cost states like California are at a disadvantage.
If there is more than one person in the house, such as a spouse or roommate, they can each use the safe harbor as long as they are not counting the same space. If one person has more than one office in the home for more than one business, the person can either use actual expenses for all the businesses, or the person must use the safe harbor for all the businesses. However, the maximum deduction allowed is still $1,500 for all the businesses in the home combined, which may have to be allocated pro rata to the businesses based on square footage used by each. If one person has qualified home offices in more than one home, the person can use the safe harbor for one home, but must use actual expenses for the other home.
When claiming the safe harbor deduction, you are allowed to take your property taxes and mortgage interest in full as itemized deductions on Schedule A as well as claiming the safe harbor deduction. On the surface this sounds like a plus, but for self-employed individuals you are effectively converting expenses that used to be on your Schedule C reducing self-employment taxes to itemized deductions which do not reduce self-employment taxes, and perhaps do not even reduce income taxes if you do not itemize.
Another big difference when claiming the safe harbor deduction is that no depreciation expense is allowed to be taken. Traditionally, any depreciation expense taken on your home is required to be recaptured at the time you sell your house, and you must pay tax on it. Even the section 121 exclusion ($250,000 tax-free gain for single/$500,000 for married couples) when living in the house for two out of the last five years will not exempt you from recapture taxes. Occasionally that can produce negative results, but it is usually helpful because it often helps people avoid income AND self-employment tax which are typically higher than recapture rates. Nonetheless, I regularly see tax returns where no depreciation was taken on a home office, to “avoid recapture.” This is incorrect as recapture rules require you to recapture any depreciation “allowed or allowable.” It does not matter whether you took the deduction or not, you are technically still on the hook for the recapture.
One other notable exception in the 15 pages of new rules explaining the safe harbor is that carryover expenses are not allowed for safe harbor years. Ordinarily, if your business produces a loss, you are not allowed to create a bigger loss from business use of home expenses with the exception of the portion of mortgage interest, property taxes, or casualty losses which would have been allowed as itemized deductions even if you had no business. The rest of the expenses get carried over to future years until you make a profit and can use the losses. Using the safe harbor, any loss generated by the safe harbor disappears forever. You would be better off in these years using actual expenses in order to preserve the losses for the future.
At the end of the day, you might as well just continue to track the actual expenses, and let your tax professional figure out which method will give you the best benefit each year.
In two weeks, we will go over the basic requirements in order to claim a home office deduction.
Prior articles are republished on my website at www.tlongcpa.com/blog.
IRS Circular 230 Notice: To the extent this article concerns tax matters, it is not intended to be used and cannot be used by a taxpayer for the purpose of avoiding penalties that may be imposed by law.
Travis H. Long, CPA is located at 706-B Forest Avenue, PG, 93950 and focuses on trust, estate, individual, and business taxation. He can be reached at 831-333-1041.
Travis H. Long, CPA, Inc. Blog 