Popular posts
How to Save 25-40% on ALL Personal Travel
Posted by Scott on 14th October, 2007 | 28 commentsIf you ever travel for fun and pay out of pocket, you are going to love this tip. I have been taking trips for years, like cruises and trips to Europe, and like everyone else I’ve been paying for every last one of them with my own personal dollars. So how can you pay for these trips with business dollars and effectively get a 25%-40% discount (depending upon your tax bracket) from the tax savings?
Start a travel reviews website or blog under your existing corp, and use all or most of your travel as research for the site. Wherever you go, write a review of the airline, review the restaurants you eat at, review the hotel, review the jet ski ride you took, absolutely everything, and be sure you have some kind of revenue generation happening on the site (Adsense, etc). The expenses will be necessary for the ordinary course of business and are fully deductible. If you travel with your wife, make her a legal employee and fellow travel reviewer. For kids and other non-employee travel companions, I’d suggest paying for their allocated portion of the trip out of pocket with your personal dollars. I checked with my (very conservative) accountant on this and he advised me that it is legit. Just make sure you keep excellent records and that you genuinely do maintain the travel reviews site legitimately, and do check with your accountant before you do this.
I suspect that savvy blogger John Chow may already be using this tip with his food reviews. Any time he takes pictures of a meal at a restaurant and uses those pictures to generate traffic to his business blog, that makes his meal a necessary and deductible cost. Another good tip, there.
Popularity: 57%
Sunday, October 14th, 2007 at 7:35 am and is filed under Web Business. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Community
[…] How to Save 25-40% on ALL Personal Travel […]
[…] oldest (by that I mean long-standing, not ancient and decrepit) online money makers has posted a great tip on his new blog about saving money on your travel by starting a travel reviews website and […]
[…] oldest (by that I mean long-standing, not ancient and decrepit) online money makers has posted a great tip on his new blog about saving money on your travel by starting a travel reviews website and […]
ohhh great idea, thanks for sharing. I must talk to my tax consultant about this !
We’re of to Vegas next summer and this is exactly what I was planning on doing. I started my travel website a year ago and now it’s time for some payback.
Back when I was taking a cisco training course the course instructor told me the same thing. He wanted to take trips to exotic beach locations so he started an underwater photography business. He said that his photographs can be seen on several discovery channel episodes and in books…pretty cool! Great advice!
good idea. i do this for some things, not all.
oh wow. Great idea! Time to write up some blog posts about traveling… write it off as business expense =)
very nice tip!
You’re right, be careful that you don’t go overboard. Otherwise this seems like a good way get audited.
Thats a great tip, I have been doing that for other hobbies, I had never though of applying it to a blog. I guess I am a little slow, thats a great tip.
Thanks - you and me both, I wish I had thought of it a long time ago.
Great Info for all
[…] The blog article talks about how you can save 25-40% on all personal travel. […]
Something I’ve never thought of doing.. great tips.
[…] offset. I have been planning this post for a while and came across something very similar today on W Revenue so thought this would be a good time to write about […]
hmm i do have to do something similar to cut my tax bills here in India…
So if I make a blog about beer or wine, then can I claim it back as a business expense?
“So if I make a blog about beer or wine, then can I claim it back as a business expense?”
I suppose you would be able to claim your beer and wine expenses as a business expense, if you reviewed everything you bought on your blog. Check with your accountant.
[…] How to Save 25-40% on ALL Personal Travel […] […]
Just started thinking how far can you take this. Just start a blog where you review stuff and then just review everything you buy and make some nice tax deductions. Cars, motorcycles, nights out, food, TV, stereos, clothes, .. I mean everything.
[…] Scott Wainner shows how to save the money we make. […]
[…] straight to a money maker. If you’re interested in possibly trying to make money while blogging, here is one resource, and here is another good link. If you haven’t hopped on the blogging bandwagon yet, I don’t […]
never thought of this idea good
Travel & Places
Great post!!
Great post. Business-related expenses.
Very nice idea. I’m wondering if this could apply to me? I’m starting a golf related site where I plan to review courses and write about my experience. Are the rates that I’m paying to play these courses deductible?
In my opinion yes, as long as you are writing the review for your business, and the business pays for the course fees, but as always, ask your CPA :).
I will try this service soon…