Lauren Bateman shows how YouTubers can write off business expenses to reduce taxes. Buy a $3,000 guitar for your channel, and if you're in a 20% tax bracket, it effectively costs you $2,400 instead. Office space, cameras, laptops, and instruments all count, but talk to an accountant about your specific situation.
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Hey, content creators. In this video, I'm going to show you how being a content creator and YouTuber can help you save money on your taxes.
Yes, I said taxes. And I just want to preface this with saying like, I am not an accountant, I am not a lawyer, so please always check with your accountant because these things do vary from state to state. But if you are a YouTuber, guess what? You are a business, which means that you can get a lot of tax write offs and decrease your actual income expense. Let me give you an example. So stick with me because give you a little bit of math here, but we're going to do the best we can to help you guys out. So this is a guitar that I recently purchased. All right, this is a $3,000 guitar. Now, I am a guitar teacher, which means I need this as equipment to conduct my business, just like a YouTuber would need a camera or lighting. So anything I am using right now to make this video is, is a tax write off. So when I bought this guitar, it was $3,000, but I bought this with pre tax dollars versus post tax dollars, which actually, as a business owner made this guitar cost me a lot less money. Let me show you how. All right, so I'm going to keep this very, very simple math here. So we're just going to say you're someone who makes $10,000 a year, all right? And if you are in a 20% tax bracket, that means you pay $2,000 a year in taxes, which essentially leaves you with $8,000 in income to do what you need to do with your life. Now, if you bought the $3,000 guitar, that leaves you with $5,000 at the end of the day. Now let's compare that. To me, the business owner, I make $10,000 a year, but, but I bought this guitar. So the guitar was $3,000. That comes out of my income pre tax, which means I am now left with $7,000 in income and I am only taxed on the 7,000, not the 10,000. That's the difference. So my tax bill is actually now only $1,400, leaving me with 5,600, $600 left in income. So you can see by being a business and buying equipment that I'm already using and needing for my business, I have essentially saved myself $600 on that guitar. So that guitar didn't cost me $3,000, actually cost me $2,400 in this very, very simple example. So, Lauren, what other types of things can you write off? And this is where I highly recommend you get a good accountant if you're running your own business, own taxes, especially when things start getting complicated, a good accountant can actually save you a lot more money than doing it on your own. But things you can also write off this is an office. I work in an office as a completely separate space for my house and I can actually write off this office space off of my income for me as a guitar player, guitar picks, guitar strings, capos and other guitar accessories. As a YouTuber I can write off my camera equipment, I can write off my microphones. I I can even write off the laptop that I do my work on. And if you're someone like me that has a set, any decorations that you have that are based around your set, that is all a tax write off. Now there are so many things that you can write off as a business and like I said, I highly recommend you have a sit down discussion with an accountant because you can probably save yourself a lot of money by learning about tax write offs in your business. If you found this helpful, leave me a comment below on some of the things you think you can write off in your YouTube business.
