What Expenses Can I Claim Being Self Employed?

Do you need to know what expenses can I claim being self employed for filing tax returns late?

Help With the Question What Expenses Can I Claim Being Self Employed?

What’s allowable? We will summarize the answers to what expenses can I claim being self employed below.

1) Entertaining staff

This is allowed for tax purposes as staff welfare.

This only applies to official employees, not freelancers/subcontractors.

Entertaining clients, clients or 3rd parties – You should include this as a company expense, however, this isn’t always a full allowed expense.

That is a low rate so only use this if your work house is minimal.

2) Apportion your home running costs

Calculate the actual running costs for your home and distribute them fairly based on how you use your home to run your company.

Begin by calculating the rooms number you’ve in your home, minus kitchens, bathrooms and hallways.

Then you have to work out the percentage of time any of these rooms are utilized for your company.

For instance, you can have four rooms, two bedrooms, a living room and an office.

You use one of the four rooms, your workplace, 50% of the time for your self employed work.

Your total household running costs are 5,000 annually.

You would calculate your business use of 50% x 1/4 x 5,000 to get a figure that could be classified as the rental cost for your business using a workspace in your home, which in this case would be 625.

This would mean that you send 625 on your tax return as your costs for working from home.

Tips: Don’t allocate a room just for business use ensure that there’s also an element of personal use to avoid any capital gains tax implications.

You may include mortgage interest in your calculations.

Calculate your percentage of business use and that’s the amount of the cost you can claim for your cell phone.

Make sure to keep a note of how this has been calculated as tax authorities might want to see some evidence of your workings.

3) Subsistence and Travel

If you’re travelling to carry out your work then reasonable drink and food costs can be claimed.

The rules on this are comparable to travel expenses the travel must be allowable and qualifies as business travel and you must be away from your normal place of work.

An allowable scenario for a subsistence claim will be if you had been staying away from home overnight to work the following day in a location you don’t typically visit.

You can’t avoid incurring some subsistence costs in order to carry out your work and for that reason, these will be allowable.

4) Training

Trying to upskill or expand your knowledge?

In several cases the expenditure is allowable.

If you’re looking to continue your professional development, building on already acquired skills, knowledge and professional skills already acquired expenses are allowable for tax purposes.

5) Medical Health Insurance

Medical health insurance generally is expensive even when you get it through your employer, if you are on COBRA because you’re between employers it is even less affordable.

Since these issues are so prominent additional insurance plans became the solution for many people shopping for medical and dental coverage.

There basically two kinds of supplemental insurance protection that’s available to the consumer.

Student Coverage: Student Coverage is usually offered through universities and colleges at a small annually fee.

The annual fee is usually between $120 and $180 plus they cover most medical and dental routine care.

With a few plans, you might be part of a medical network and be assigned to a medical clinic.

The coverage has grown in strength and popularity due to the fact that there’s a growing population of the self employed and the high cost of traditional insurance cost.

Do yourself a favour and check out the different choices you’ve with regards to medical and dental coverage, you may surprise yourself.

There’ll be small costs associated with these plans for the most and you may be able to claim some of it back.

Discount Medical and Dental Coverage: Discount medical and dental insurance are a great alternative because they offer medical and dental services at discount prices.

What usually happens is that a company will negotiate medical procedures, routine visits, routine exams and ancillary services with providers.

The negotiation will give the consumer purchasing power and will lower your medical costs.

An example of this will be where you pay a month-to-month premium of $14.95 for supplemental dental coverage and your fillings would cost you $7.00.

In closing, I hope this helps you understand more about the question what expenses can I claim being self employed.

Faithful in your success!