To add on to the other explanations: The thing you heard about 10 years ago was likely Trump’s tax bill that increased the standard deduction - a set amount that you can deduct instead of having to do a lot of math - and took a way a lot of deductions.
A deduction just means “you don’t pay taxes on that money.”
The big deductions that hurt was removing deductions for items people bought for work. The idea is that the employer should be providing that stuff, but that’s not always realistic.
Without a doctor’s note, lots of businesses aren’t going to buy an employee an ergonomic chair because it costs 10 times as much as the Amazon special. They also aren’t going to buy you a wardrobe of business suits that you’ll only use for meetings. Being able to write that stuff off was huge for some of us.
I had to convince my side gig (teaching scuba and underwater photography) to change me from employee to contractor because I suddenly couldn’t write off my gear.
Tell me about it. I’d been fully remote for about three years before that took effect, and I could take a pretty hefty deduction for my home office because of how it was calculated
To add on to the other explanations: The thing you heard about 10 years ago was likely Trump’s tax bill that increased the standard deduction - a set amount that you can deduct instead of having to do a lot of math - and took a way a lot of deductions.
A deduction just means “you don’t pay taxes on that money.”
The big deductions that hurt was removing deductions for items people bought for work. The idea is that the employer should be providing that stuff, but that’s not always realistic.
Without a doctor’s note, lots of businesses aren’t going to buy an employee an ergonomic chair because it costs 10 times as much as the Amazon special. They also aren’t going to buy you a wardrobe of business suits that you’ll only use for meetings. Being able to write that stuff off was huge for some of us.
I had to convince my side gig (teaching scuba and underwater photography) to change me from employee to contractor because I suddenly couldn’t write off my gear.
Tell me about it. I’d been fully remote for about three years before that took effect, and I could take a pretty hefty deduction for my home office because of how it was calculated