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My accountant friend said I didn't need to track expenses under $75
My friend Mike who does taxes told me last year not to bother tracking anything under $75 since it 'wouldn't matter.' Well I had about 40 of those little receipts from office supplies and printer ink at Staples in Indianapolis. When I added them up for 2023 I had $2,800 in deductions I almost missed. Has anyone else gotten bad advice from someone who seemed like they knew what they were talking about?
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the_sage3mo ago
Yeah I read somewhere that the IRS doesn't have an official minimum for tracking expenses, only that they need to be "ordinary and necessary." Sounds like your friend was giving out some pretty lazy advice there.
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the_robin3mo ago
Oh man, I learned that one the hard way. I used to not track anything under 20 bucks because I figured it was too small to matter, and then I realized at tax time I had zero idea where a solid chunk of my deductions went. What finally worked for me was just taking a photo of every receipt with my phone, no matter how tiny the amount (coffee runs, parking meters, all of it), and tossing them into a folder on my Google Drive at the end of each month. It sounds like overkill but it saved my butt more than once when I got audited and needed to prove a pattern of spending.
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