Looking at being home alone from a few perspectives, with and without a home business, a few things ring true either way. While being home is great and so far superior to commuting, it can get lonely.
If you do not take regular ‘breathers’ to get out of the house or at the very least to do something besides your business, it can feel depressing and smothering, like “cabin fever”, no matter how much fun you are having with your home business. You need to refresh your browser!
At the same time, and in the same vein, you need to be able to stop working sometimes even though it is midnight and you can’t go outside or go shopping to get away from it. You need to sleep and to rest and relax – If you need to make an appointment to schedule this with yourself, just do it.
Totally on the other hand, if you do stay home a lot anyway, why not do something productive with your home like make it generate money to help with its upkeep and to make it a better living environment for you. Your home, whether you own it or even if you rent an apartment, can be something that it would be very wise to monetize!
US Federal income tax-wise, there are benefits that you can get for running a business in your home. For example you can deduct a percentage of all your housing costs – the space, utilities, equipment, communications, (Internet service, phone, etc). These of course would also include direct business expenses like advertising, technical services, software, etc). There are schedules you file with your regular itemized personal income taxes (form 1040), that are for use of your home for business, *(form 8829) and profit or loss from business (*schedule C); (and of course self-employment tax (*schedule SE).
You can file these for a certain number of years even if you do not make any money or any profit from your home business. However, if after that time you have not made any money then it would be considered a hobby and as such you wouldn’t be able to deduct any business expenses. But hey – why not have a hobby that you can possibly eventually earn a little money with!? Your hobby is money. So point is don’t give up on your home business even if you have to do without all the deductions.
You can also look at your hobby home biz as a learning tool and who knows what you might eventually develop if you keep it real low key; because especially if you work all day or whatever, you may have a problem looking at working again when you get home, working on your ‘days off’, etc. Of course again that is not so much the case if you enjoy working and you love working from home. The problem might be how to stop! 😉
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