You are a moron. This is not the first time you have chirped in to say I am wrong when it is plain that you are barely able to read. Let me spell it out for you. Read slowly and carefully. 1. Nowhere have I stated or advised anyone NOT to take the home office deduction. 2. My objection was to the guy from H&R Block, my former employer when I was in college, who made the idiotic claim that because he was an enrolled agent from Block he knew for a fact that the home office deduction had no impact on audit risk. Oh yeah, it was all in the way the form was filled out. LOL 3. I passed the SEE and became an enrolled agent while I was in college. I brought that up to give my opinion that the SEE was hardly the challenging exam the EA from Block implied it to be. 4(a). I got a chuckle out of the EA from Block asserting that he knew what he was talking about because he was the one "representing the respondent in court." My query as to how he gained bar membership was a trick question which he failed to address and he instead just made an ad hominem attack on my user name. That pretty much revealed that he didn't know the process by which an EA (or CPA) may get qualified to practice in the US Tax Court by passing the US Tax Court exam, which from what I've heard is quite rigorous compared to the SEE. 4(b). Many people assume that the CPA (or EA) designation automatically allows practice before the US Tax Court, but that is false. In actuality very few CPAs and even fewer EAs get qualified for the simple reason that it is better to go to trial with a tax attorney, and also because the Tax Court is only one of three venues that hears federal tax cases. The other two venues allow only attorneys to practice; they are the US Court of Federal Claims and the US District Court. Now let me make clear what I think about taking the home office deduction or any deduction in general: If a person qualifies to take the deduction and in his mind is worth the effort to keep records and such, by all means he should never let the possibility of an audit deter him from taking it. The truth is the probability of an audit is very low even with the home office deduction and in most cases can be handled without professional help. Moreover, if the deduction is denied at a later time, usually the consequence is just the additional tax he would have paid anyway plus interest. That being said, I personally do not bother with it for the same reason others have stated: it doesn't amount to much. The same goes for other possible deductions that have a mixed business/personal use. For me, it's just not worth the effort to keep adequate records. I disdain paperwork which is why I refuse to trade stocks. As much as possible I keep the housekeeping shit to a minimum.
damn Icarus, you don't need to defend yourself. We all know you are cool and anyone defending the IRS is an idiot. IRS agents are the same guys who thought if they could just have a cool car they could get a date with the same girls the quarterback was dating. They never could figure out that although the cars were cool if you didn't have to pay for it, the girls were bimbos.
proving that you are a professional trader? You just figure out if it helps you tax wise. In most cases it does. And you tell them you are a trader. I suppose it could get shitty if you never make a profit, but you just tell them and that is how you file. Goddamn, if you're too scared to go up against the IRS how are you ever gonna compete with Goldman Sachs? In the old days it made a difference because you had to pay extra for data feed and everything else normal people didn't pay for. Now my daughter has more info on her iphone than I had as a professional trader. Like the guy said, if you are full time it's better to just file as unemployed. In a bad year you can still get food stamps.
I did this rough calculation once @ 8 cents/KW hr and came up with roughly 26 to 35$ per month per computer depending on monitors etc., assuming everything left on 24-7. After that I realized the importance of having your computers hibernate automatically.
Interesting, I leave 3 machines running 24 x 7 and consume nowhere near that much power - you would need to average 500 watts 24 x 7 to hit $26 for a month at 8 cents/KWh. If you use a SmartUPS (that tells you current draw) or a Kill A Watt type device I think you will find that a PC actually uses much less than that.
That may be where my calculation goes astray, because if I remember correctly I just used the PC's rated power consumption in the calculation. Do you have a reliable figure for how much current your computer typically is drawing when operating? I could do an accurate calculation with that number, assuming it is supplied with 117 Volts RMS.
85 Watts, this is an Intel i7, 4GB, 4 hard drives but does not include the monitor (which isn't attached to the UPS)
exactly. i was unable to come up with 500$ a month no matter what. forget about 500$ for electricity used for "office".. my typical total bill for whole entire house(gas and electricity combined) rarely goes above $200(8.7 cents per kwh fixed rate) and i have 8 monitors and 4-5 dual core PC's running all day. video card is a electricity hog and big heat contributor . having cheap simple NVS cards and high efficiency power supply work very well for me.