Saturday, January 22, 2011

Deducting Your Home Office Furniture - 3 Questions You Need to Ask Yourself First

When you have a home business, doing your taxes can get a little tricky. But as long as you are well-informed as to what you can and cannot do, you will be able to take all of the tax deductions that you're legally entitled to. After all, there is no reason to leave money sitting on the table if you don't have to! So, how can you tell if your home office furniture is tax deductible? Start by asking yourself these 3 questions:

1. Is my home office furniture really only used for business purposes?

In order to legally take your home office furniture as a tax deduction, you can only use it for business purposes. In the eyes of the IRS, this means 100% of the time. If you bought a couch so that clients have a place to sit - but also for guests to sleep on when they spend the night - then your couch will not count as a legitimate home office tax deduction. Or, if you bought a bookcase - but your kids store their books on it, too - it's not really a business purchase.

2. Have I kept good records that will help me prove my case, if I ever need to?

Your taxes don't end as soon as you mail in your return. Down the road, you could get audited. Then, it will be up to you to convince the IRS that you did everything by the book. The only way to do that is to hang onto as many records as you can. That way, if it ever comes down to it, you can prove exactly how much you spent on home office furniture - and what exactly it was that you bought.

3. Do my home office furniture purchases make sense?

If your purchases and deductions are ever called into question, everything should make common sense. For example, if you deduct the price of a sofa bed as home office furniture, the IRS may wonder why a regular couch wasn't sufficient. Do you have clients spend the night, or are you simply trying to get away with buying a new sofa bed for your guest room and trying to deduct the cost? If your deducted purchases defy common sense, you may very well be asked to answer for them. Before you deduct anything, make sure that the explanation behind will stand up.

Bedroom Furniture - Decoration Considerations For Your Bedroom

Bedroom furniture decoration is an essential consideration when planning your bedroom. The furniture not only looks great, which affects the decoration side, but it is essential to have in your bedroom, and its physical characteristics will play a part in the planning side. Otherwise where else will you put all of your clothes? Where will you sleep? How will you get dressed?

Being that you spend about one third of your life in your bedroom, or more specifically in your bed, you will want to make sure that your bedroom looks as calming and relaxing to you as possible, with the possible exception of a student living away from home - in which case you may be too busy and active socially to really care that much about your bedroom.

For those that do care about the look of their bedroom, one of the first things you will need to take into consideration when considering bedroom furniture decoration is what type of mood is currently set by your bedroom, and how you want the mood to be affected by the new furniture. So if you're happy with the current mood of your bedroom, and would like more earthly kind of feel to it, then opting for natural oak or natural pine wood wardrobes and bedroom furniture will be fine for you. On the other hand if you are looking to brighten up your bedroom, then you will want to get some painted furniture - typically you can get painted furniture in white, cream, or ivory. And for more select tastes, or for children's bedrooms, you can also get furniture painted in other bright colors too.

Also for bedroom furniture decoration consider the style of furniture that you want. For example with wardrobes, you can get a wardrobe with a single door, or a double sized wardrobe with two doors, or triple sized wardrobe with three doors. What sized wardrobe you get will of course be dictated by how much clothes and other accessories you need to store away. And also you may like to consider a wardrobe with sliding doors if that style of furniture particularly takes your fancy.

Whatever type of wardrobe you get, and other bedroom furniture, you will want to make sure that you have done your measurements properly and thoroughly. There is nothing worse than getting furniture that is larger than can be comfortably accommodated in your bedroom. So make sure that you measure everything fully to ensure that you can put your furniture in and utilize it without feeling like you have been cramped into a tight space, or constantly needing to shift other pieces of furniture and equipment in your bedroom to access a single piece of furniture.