Common claims here seem to be divorced couples both fighting to claim dependents, or for the childless among us, trying to claim older parents as dependents. You also need to provide more than half of the monetary support for the person in question, and if it’s not a child, they need to have made less than $4,300 in income over the entire year. These are numbers that invite fudging given the potential tax break, but fudging in this case is a felony. Not only that, you can rain down a bevy of IRS interest on the person you claimed as well.
Writing Off Your Commute
The idea of “business expenses” is inherently attractive. You get some sweet-ass deductions, you get to feel like a big-time business boy or girl. Win-win, right? In reality, though, they’re not only mostly useless for a large portion of the population due to the existence of the standard deduction, but horrendously ticky-tacky. One thing that seems like an easy no-brainer, especially with gas prices spiking, is to write off commuting costs as a business expense. After all, how are you going to work if you can’t get there?
Unfortunately, this one isn’t that complicated. It’s pretty much just a hard no from the IRS. Commuting costs are not tax-deductible as a broad category, outside of very specific criteria that probably do not apply to you.