10 Tax Deductions Freelancers Can Make
This article is courtesy of Freelance Switch.
Tax time can be especially stressful for freelancers: despite paying estimated tax payments throughout the year, it’s rare that a freelancer doesn’t still have to come up with some money for April 15 — or come up with a long enough list of deductions.
There are quite a few deductions available to freelancers that may not seem obvious when you first sit down with all those 1099s and receipts. But as long as you have the right documentation, you can write off plenty of deductions you may never have thought of.
Unpaid Invoices
Did one of your clients disappear over the course of last year, leaving you with an unpaid invoice or two? The IRS allows you to write off those invoices as bad debts. Writing them off as a freelancer is a little more complicated than for other types of businesses: that invoice must be included in your gross income, which means that you must use the accrual method of accounting (reporting income as you earn it). If you use the cash method, you didn’t need to report an unpaid invoice to the IRS at all. For more information, look at IRS Publication 535.
Continue reading this article to discover the other nine deductions!
This article was last modified on January 6, 2023
This article was first published on February 18, 2009
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