Business Life Archives - Successful Blog

Make It Your Business to Get All Available Deductions

April 13, 2016 by Thomas

Running your own business comes when joys and heartaches. The key is to avoid too much of the latter.

With that being the case, recording and paying taxes as a business owner can be one of life’s biggest headaches.

If you’re self-employed and have no employees under you, life is much easier when it comes to your tax responsibilities.

On the other side, making sure you take the right amount of money out for employees and meeting your other tax responsibilities as a business owner, well, it can sometimes seem downright taxing.

Don’t Make Running a Business Taxing

In running your own business, be sure that you not only are meeting all your tax requirements, but that you are receiving the deductions entitled to you.

For those individuals working out of their homes full-time, there are myriad of deductions one qualifies for, though many oftentimes forget or quite frankly do not know what is and isn’t acceptable to the IRS.

If you’re one of those self-employed folks working out of a private residence, note the following:

Your home is deductible…. up to a point – Working out of your home does allow for some deductions, but don’t expect to cover the entire residence from top to bottom. If you set aside a room etc. as your work area, you can use that as a deduction (estimate the square footage involved). What you can’t do is try and deduct the entire residence;
Your home office supplies – Assuming that your business needs office supplies, those can be used as deductions. Make sure you save the receipts for items you purchase. If you end up getting a new computer, fax machine, printer or other such office item, you can also deduct those. The key is always to save the paperwork from such purchases, especially if you need to show at a later date that you did in fact buy such items;
Your client meetings – When you mix and mingle with clients, you can deduct such meetings (that is up to a point). Meals and mileage to and from such meetings is fine, but don’t try and deduct a gift you may have bought them etc. Stretching things too far could run you the risk of an IRS audit, so it is definitely in your best interests to record and be honest about your deductions. If you do have legal questions or in fact do get audited, a New York tax attorney or one closer to you can assist you with how to proceed;
Your health insurance – Unless you have been under a rock for the last three or so years, you know about the governmental requirement that the majority of Americans be covered by health insurance. As a result, make sure you not only have coverage, but look to see if you are eligible for a tax credit. The whole idea behind Obamacare was to make health insurance affordable for the majority of the country. When it comes to medical items, you also can deduct a portion of your doctor visits (including mileage to and from) and prescriptions or other such purchases;
Your retirement planning – If you are wise, you have been putting away money over the years for retirement. In doing so, you are planning for that day and time when you will not be working, most likely getting by on Social Security income. Whether you have an IRA or other such retirement vehicle, try and contribute as much as possible to it yearly. This then allows you to record deductions from the money you put into the plan. While there are caps on how much individuals may invest in their retirement portfolios, doing it now and getting the deductions makes it well worth it.

When it comes to doing your taxes as a self-employed business owner, they don’t have to seem as frightening as they might first appear.

Getting organized now, keeping all your necessary receipts, and knowing who to turn to in the event of a dispute and/or audit, can make all the difference in the world.

If doing your taxes seems a bit taxing to you, put organization and the help of others to work for you.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

About the Author: Dave Thomas writes about business topics on the web.

What Possible Benefit Could Anyone Get from a Blog?

September 18, 2008 by Liz

Starting a Conversation Offline

This spring I’ve made it a mission to reconnect with the people doing business outside the Internet. They represent most of the people on this blue planet. It only makes sense that to grow my business, most of my customers will come from that group. I want to understand how they view the Internet. So I started finding gatherings where I could have conversations and learn things. I went looking for patterns and what they seem to reveal.

What I see is a huge gap.

You’ve probably seen it too.

Many business people I met seem to see the Internet as interactive TV. They imagine it works something like a television news room. The virtual connectedness and the personal / business relationships don’t come through. What they describe is an endeavor separate, possibly equal, but unrelated to what they do.

They still hear the word blog and the look in their eyes gets a little glassy. So I’m off to BlogWorld to give a presentation. Sure hope to meet you there, but be prepared, I’m going to be asking . . .

How do you tell people of the benefits of blogging?

Sure am interested in your answer.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Take 5 Minutes to Find a State of Blogger Wellness

June 12, 2008 by Liz

Not long ago, I asked Pamir Kiciman about his ideas for a guest post. Pamir writes for Reiki Help Blog about practical spirituality. I wasn’t disappointed when his first response said, “I really see no content to help the person doing the biz, it’s all about the tech, biz itself, content, clients, selling, etc. . . . So my idea for your readers is a piece about being healthy at the desktop, some practical, easy-to-use self-enhancing methods to engender wellness for even better output.”

Take 5 minutes to do what Pamir suggests. I did.

Blogger Wellness
by Pamir Kiciman, BA, RM. CHt

Lay of the land

You’ve identified your niche, settled on a blog platform, know your categories, have a SEO strategy and have put yourself out there on the Live Web. Way to go! It’s fun, exciting and fast. Your blog has a clean design and nifty widgets, comments are coming in, people Digg your content and you feel legit.

You social network, your workspace is simple, you love the resolution of your LCD monitor and your chair is ergoncomfy. You’re ready for another day on Web 2.0, or rather the Web on steroids! There’s the Twitter notification, the new comment too and your buddy IMs, a potential client fills out your contact form. Meanwhile your lover texts you about dinner and romance.

Life is good. Or is it? You have nagging tension in your shoulders, your mouse hand hurts and you want to replace your neck. The next morning none of these are too noticeable. Well, at least until the fifteenth email. Then discomfort creeps in again.

After some time, you numb to the physical symptoms although they persist. Yet productivity drops. Your monitor doesn’t look so hi-def to your bleary eyes, and you feel lethargic, even resentful. You feel you don’t have a single original thought to contribute and everything is an effort.

You promise yourself to do something about it before it gets to this point next time, but when you scour the Web next to nothing comes up for desktop health. Until now. In fact the first page of results in Google returns links about getting your health record on your desktop. If you search ‘blogger wellness’ Google asks if you meant ‘blogs health’ because that’s a nice little category.

Antidotes to blogger stress

There’s a natural function of your body that is with you 24/7/365. This function takes place in its quiet way independently of you. It has a job to do and it doesn’t wait for you to show up. Thankfully. It follows a rhythm and doesn’t waver or hesitate. It comes in and goes out like a finely-tuned clock, and doesn’t expect anything. Selflessly it serves you, while you mostly ignore it.

Can you guess? It’s your BREATH!

Nature has so arranged it that the diaphragm will expand and contract on its own, oxygen will enter and carbon dioxide leave, the lungs will fill and empty keeping you alive. After all, during sleep you don’t notice your breath, why should you when awake? You have so many more important things to handle!

Have you ever watched a healthy baby breathe? See that little stomach go up and down? Notice how easy and natural it is for them. Their breaths are full, smooth not jerky, starting at the abdomen they breathe and fill the lungs. They exhale all the way. There isn’t any constriction or unusual noise in the breath.

This is the breath you’ve forgotten. This is the breath you put on automatic pilot. Your breath is the one friend that you can ill afford to take for granted. It doesn’t require a cell phone or e-mail. It’s free and loyal. It doesn’t argue back.

But breathing without awareness means you’re not getting half of what you could from this resource. The breath obviously brings oxygen into your body and takes carbon dioxide out. The action of the diaphragm massages the internal organs. Even these mundane benefits aren’t properly available if your breath is shallow or high in the chest, or if you catch yourself not breathing for a few seconds (it happens quite often!).

More than all the biological factors of the breath, what it really brings is the new in essence form. Undoubtedly there is more than nutrients, water, oxygen and heartbeat that sustains you. If you think about the longterm effects of stress, you realize that it sticks to your organs, muscles and mind long after the stimulus that created the stress is gone. When you breathe with awareness, you also replace old stuck energies of all kinds with freshness, and each conscious breath becomes a house-cleansing.

Five-minute Breathing

Recommended for daily use at your monitor, 3 times a day for 5 minutes each time.

Turn off your monitor & sound, as well as cell phone. Turn away from your monitor if you like.
Sit comfortably in your chair with your spine erect but not rigid.
Keep your feet flat on the floor, legs uncrossed.
Hands are comfortably in your lap.
Get a sense of your posture & purpose. This is your time.
Tune into your body. Simply observe your body’s natural breath, without changing it.
Get to know your breath, how your body breathes, and all the sensations and feelings associated with it.
Gradually deepen your breath and make it slower and longer.
Direct your diaphragm to expand slowly, inhaling slowly, making sure the breath starts in the abdomen and fills the lungs from the bottom up.
Consciously direct on the exhalation, making sure to exhale slowly and all the way down.
Continue breathing like this for the rest of the five minutes.
You may reach a calm, heightened sense of awareness.
After practicing daily for a while, breathing may become minimal toward the end of the allotted time.

When done, take a moment to feel your presence in the room, open your eyes and continue with your day.

Thanks, Pamir. I’m feeling better already!

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Where Are You in the Blogging Gold Rush?

April 8, 2008 by Liz

History Has a Way of Repeating Itself

A recent article in the NY Times went on in detail about the digital sweatshop — bloggers who work at home paid to write by the post. It held up the deaths of two bloggers and the heart attack of a third. Then it followed that with quotes by big-name bloggers to underscore the point that blogging isn’t good for our health.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

It distressed me to read this, because I see the reality behind it.
But it distressed me more, because I see the misperceptions glaring back.

We need to see reality to make healthy choices about stress.

Though it uses the word, emerging the article makes blogging sound like a fully grown industry. It’s not.

Business Pioneers — A Blogging Gold Rush

Blogging is not an industry no matter how we dress it up or talk about it. An industry has a structure that has established itself with conventions and models that prove themselves time. We’re still living in “carve a path” pioneer times. The business of blogging is still trying to prove viability.

Lately it seems I meet three sorts — blogging gold rushers, business pioneers, and those who watch.

During the gold rush, some folks went with dreams of striking it rich by panning the water and having luck. Some folks chronicled the adventure. Some folks watched. Business pioneers — folks with plans and business models — built places for people to eat, sleep, buy goods, and get entertained. Fewer folks, business pioneers with determination and long vision, built railroads, communication systems, dams, and business empires. Some folks worked for companies who were doing those things. Some of those workers got paid well. Some did not. In between them all were shysters who came to make fast cash and run.

Some folks won. Some folks cheated. Some folks reported events. Some folks lost. Some folks didn’t participate at all.

Where are you in this blogging gold rush?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Have a plan! Work with Liz!!
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Using Common Wisdom and Goals to Avoid Perceived Productivity

February 5, 2008 by Liz

Working Hard and Getting Nowhere

Every company that I work with has some issue with perceived productivity — people working hard at things that add no value. It might be a team that’s lost direction or a culture that does things as they’ve always been done. It could a department who never evaluates the effectivenees of their process.

I suppose that comes from a misaligned perception that hard work is equal to a positive contribution. It’s not so. A positive contribution is any work that moves us closer to our goals — sometimes that’s hard work; sometimes it’s simple and elegant.

When we work at home, it’s easy to fall victim to the lure of productivity that gets us nowhere. We feel like we’re working. No one says our time investment isn’t worth it. In the past few months, people have said these things to me:

I’m all I can and in the last 6 months, I’ve only made $600.

I work 14 hours a day. I guess you need money to make money.

In my last job, I was a high performing VP. Now I can’t get a client to talk to me.

Every time I asked what they were doing. They answered with common wisdom about successful blogging.

I spend hours writing high-quality blog posts.
I spend hours writing comments and social networking.
I tweak my blog to make it more inviting.

If you’ve got a blog, you know that it’s work to do all of that. It’s highly productive work, if the goal is to build a first-rate blog audience. But the folks who came to me had a goal to build a client-based business. They were working hard on some things that wouldn’t take them where wanted to be.

It was perceived productivity. Wisdom needs to match up wth where we’re going.

Each person took a minute to apply their goals to what they were doing. The wisdom matched to their goals made a new purpose and new direction. Every high-quality blog post and every hour spent networking and commenting was considered in light of their business. A slight shift made a big difference. Time spent became highly productive.

Wisdom + goals = direction, purpose, productivity

Ever been victim to perceived productivity?

I have. Now I keep my goal in front of me.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

The Best Business Advice Ever . . . in 50 Words

December 12, 2007 by Liz

Have you been following the b5media Business Apprentice Team Challenge? Up to now, two teams have been advising a fictional entrepreneur called Kay on her business decisions. Last week, while I was gone, my team — the Aces — won again. They are a brilliant group. You can catch up on what’s happened so far at b5media Business Apprentice updates.

This week it becomes every blog on our own.

Our Task: Give Kay the best business advice we’ve ever heard . . . in 50 words. –Liz

Some Advice for Kay

My father listened more than he talked. After a large sit-down at our house, a friend once remarked, “That meal was over an hour. The only word I heard your father say was bread. He didn’t even ask for the butter.”

When I told my dad, his reply made me laugh. He said, “I don’t like butter much.”

My dad left home and school in 1919. He was 12. Everything he knew about business and life he learned from paying attention to the world around him.

It was my dad who taught me to view the world as a lifelong business school.

The Best Business Advice Ever . . . in 50 Words

Each morning when he drove me to school, my dad would point out people we saw and tell me what he observed. When we got the place where he dropped me off, we had a small ritual — a sort of script we would go through. I can’t say quite how it started, and I no longer remember it word for word. But it went something like this . . .

Dad would park the car, turn to me, smile, and ask, “What’s the score?”

I would answer the same every time, with words I had learned from him — bits at a time — over the years. To this day it’s the best business advice I’ve ever heard.

Learn your business from your customers. Understand their minds, their hearts, and their lives. Do what you do to make their lives easier. When a problem comes, leave them a place to stand and stand tall beside them. . . . And remember, everyone is your customer, even your dad.

Then his eyes would light with smile. He’d offer his huge, work-worn hand, shake mine, give a nod, and say, “It’s a pleasure doing business with you.”

I’d answer something like, “Oh dad, you’re too cool.”

All I would add is cherish the rituals and traditions. They make moments remarkably unforgettable.

What’s the best business advice you ever heard? Is there a story that goes with it?

If you think my dad’s advice would serve a young entrepreneur, would you give Successful-Blog a vote in the poll in the sidebar at TAXGIRL?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Starting a Conversation Offline

Blogger Wellness by Pamir Kiciman, BA, RM. CHt

Lay of the land

Antidotes to blogger stress

Five-minute Breathing

History Has a Way of Repeating Itself

Business Pioneers — A Blogging Gold Rush

Working Hard and Getting Nowhere

Some Advice for Kay

The Best Business Advice Ever . . . in 50 Words

Blogger Wellness
by Pamir Kiciman, BA, RM. CHt