International Law

Writing off your personal life

Wired's Steve Friess raises a very intriguing tax question, "When Your Personal Life Is Your Business, Is Everything a Tax Write-off?":

Sometime last year, podcaster Anneke Rudegeair bought three different brands of condoms. This month, she sat down with TurboTax and listed the cost of rubbers as a deduction. It was, she believes, a business expense.

Rudegair, 28, is better known to legions of fans as Soccergirl Incorporated, the self-described "podcasting librarian with big tits." Her job, for which she grossed $22,000 in 2007, is to show off her charms on her site and purr about all things sexual in her podcasts.

So there's an argument to be made that the Future-Condom Challenge she and her boyfriend undertook was part of the gig.

"What otherwise would be your regular life becomes your business life; that's been true for podcasting since the beginning," said Rudegair, of Germantown, N.Y. "It's all legitimate."

Nice work if you can get it. Which, technically, is the central conundrum of new media pioneers and their accountants at tax time: In an age when bloggers and podcasters are making a living -- or trying to -- by blogging and podcasting about their personal lives, what exactly is legitimate? And if writing off your personal life is as easy as writing about it online and getting some Google ads, why doesn't everybody do it?

The Internal Revenue Service certainly doesn't make it clear.

Read more here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on April 15, 2008 (boomark / email).