Video: Tips to Help Self-Employed Save Money at Tax-Time
If you’re self-employed, you need to know about all of the tax deductions you can get, plus how retirement savings can help you lower your taxes, too.
The One Big Beautiful Bill that passed includes permanently extending tax cuts from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, including increasing the cap on the amount of state and local or sales tax and property tax (SALT) that you can deduct, makes cuts to energy credits passed under the Inflation Reduction Act, makes changes to taxes on tips and overtime for certain workers, reforms Medicaid, increases the Debt ceiling, and reforms Pell Grants and student loans. Updates to this article are in process. Check our One Big Beautiful Bill article for more information.
Video Transcript:
Tracy Byrnes: With the gig economy everywhere these days, there's a ton of people self-employed. So it's really important to understand what should go in your tax return, and what shouldn't, quite frankly. Lisa Greene-Lewis, TurboTax expert and CPA, is here with us right now. So I think the first thing people have to realize when they become self-employed, is that Schedule C becomes their new best friend, isn't it?
Lisa Greene-Lewis: Yes, it is your best friend, and you can take a lot of deductions on there.
Tracy Byrnes: Right. And so some of the things to start to think about are the retirement contributions. Just because you're self-employed doesn't mean you shouldn't save for retirement. You have a self-employed IRA, or a SEP IRA, you can still make some contributions to that, can't you?
Lisa Greene-Lewis: Yeah, so for tax year 2022, you can still contribute to your SEP IRA, or make a 2022 contribution up to $61,000, or 25% of your income, whichever is less, and make an impact on that tax return. And for tax year 2023, it's up to $66,000, or 25% of your income.