This content was created by MARK KOHLER. This content was uploaded by MARK KOHLER. This is a YouTube video titled "Writing off Family Travel in my Business to Save Taxes" (created 2020-11-05) featuring MARK KOHLER. It's an instructional/tax-advice monologue in which Kohler explains when family travel can be deductible for a business, giving examples (inspecting rental properties, S-corp board meetings/training), stressing the need to document business activity and the involvement/age of family members, and warning against treating long personal vacations as business deductions.
Chapters
Foreign. Stop by and say, hey, I'm taking the family on a trip. Can I write off the travel for my family in my business? Great question. The answer is maybe because I'm going to ask first, what's the trip about? How old is the family and how many of the kids are there and spouse, married, whatever. So let's go through a couple examples. So let's say what I love is I want all my clients buying a rental property every year somewhere in the country or the world. And let's say they have a little rental property by grandma and they're going to go visit this rental and grandma lives in Phoenix, Arizona and they have a rental down the street maybe over in Mesa or Glendale. So they have an LLC in Arizona and they pack up the kids, fly, drive, I do not care and they take the family to Arizona to go work on the rental. Now let's say you're married and you've got a couple teenagers and you really go check on the rental, maybe do a little yard work, maybe you paint the garage door, you go check on it. Very doable. I've taken my kids on trips and we've worked on rental properties. Make the trip miserable for them. I mean why not? They deserve that work, it's good for them. But seriously, have a family excursion and teach them about rental properties. My kids are all right now trying to buy rentals and they're having a great. I'm going to just say this. One of my kids and their spouse yesterday went into the bank and got pre approved to go buy a piece of real estate. They're so excited. They're on Zillow now, looking all night and I'm like that's awesome. How many of us wish our parents would have taught us that, right? Rental property experience, taking the family. Now if you have a two year old and you're taking nine kids on a trip to go check on one rental and you don't even do any work on the rental. No, you can't write that off. So whatever. Now if you've got an S corp, you're doing a board meeting for a day and you travel to Jackson Hole, Wyoming and you have a board meeting, you do some corporate training, you're in, you're out. Yeah, I'll write off the airfare or one day or two nights of hotel or something but I'm not going to write off 10 days in the Cayman Islands. And so the older your kids are, the more involved in the business. Maybe you go to a workshop, you go visit with some clients, you deliver some product, you. So again, the more activity you can show on the trip and the more the involved your spouse or the kids are, the more I'm writing off. That makes sense, right? But if your account says no, you can't do that or you don't track anything, that's. That's not the way to do it. This is your. Be the captain and take advantage of that write off, all right?
