Just a few gotchas:

While the IRS requires you to claim all deductions you are entitled to, don’t claim ones you are not. Example: if your MLM has a minimum monthly required purchase and the products are for personal use, they are not deductible.

One deduction you are NOT required to take is for home office. This deduction is often disallowed. If the IRS goes back a number of years on that one, you could end up owing a huge amount back.

Beware of the hobby loss rules – three out of five years in the black. You risk having deductions limited to your income and subject to the 2% rule if you itemize rather than claiming all deductions allowed on Schedule C.

I have a question that you may be able to answer :

What do you put on the tax form as business description? Freelance, contract, marketing? And what tax code would this fall under.
Hope you can help
Thanks

Really interesting article. It sounds like the US and Australia are quite similar with their tax systems. Taxes is not a strong point with me and I have a father who is an accountant!

However in saying that I do recommend people actually interview their accountants. Most people will go to an accountant fairly trusting and just believe what they tell you. I learned the hard way when I was operating 2 offline businesses 10 years ago. My accountant at the time completely buggered up my taxes and I ended up with a bill of over $30,000. This ended up nearly bankrupting me. I had to take my accountants to a different accountant and have everything re filed.

The damage was however done I ended up with creditors trying to bankrupt me and lost my businesses due to the stress of the accountants mistake and the creditor and government crap! and ended up bankrupt.

Make sure you interview your accountant before you trust them with your finances. Ask them questions, lots of them. Do your own research as well! Remember when you sign your documents you are also relieving them of any wrong doing which means if your accounts are wrong it is your fault and not the accountants!

Just thought I would add my 2 cents.

Jacinta

“In accordance with IRS regulations, 1099′s are only sent to individual accounts reporting under a SSN that earned over $600 in affiliate commissions (not including direct product sales) during the calendar year. In your case, your use of an EIN on your accounts essentially removes our 1099 reporting requirement to the IRS. For your convenience, you can see the total amount of payments made to you during the year on the top of the reporting page in your accounts, for use in tax purposes.

Regards,

ClickBank Accounting
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Essentially after you get an EIN you are considered a company and required to report your own earnings. I personally would recommend to those working online to register as an LLC to protect your personal assets and limit your liability to only that of your company- I did this 3 years ago and it initially cost me less than $200 by filing the forms myself.

Then, if you go into clickbank and just take that number they give you as the amount you earned in that year, it will include all your earnings – both as an affiliate and vendor. So, you don’t want to be taxed twice on some of the earnings. You can take the total amount they put on there – then subtract the amount they put on your 1099-Misc. for affiliate earnings – then you have all your vendor earnings. It sounds complicated – but I overlooked this in past years. Also, you should calculate the processing fees as that is also needed when doing the taxes. It is all so confusing!

Last year I did not try to finish my taxes until April 13th – and I ran into problems that forced me to file for an extension- which by the way does not allow you more time if you are paying in, or at least not without penalty. One thing that really amazes me is that the write off for my home office is so small! I list it as 188 square feet and then based on the value of my house plus the cost of utilities the write off is calculated as a percentage. I think the write off only came to $650 off of my adjusted gross income. One deduction that the IRS really gives you a break on is vehicle mileage – So basically even though I have a home office I am able to deduct 55 cents per mile for traveling to get office supplies, equipment, any networking events, etc.

With Clickbank I just went to the reporting tab and it shows what the sum of my 2009 paychecks was for each of my accounts. Commission Junction has mailed me a 1099 every year since 2006, which is good. Anyway, great post, great advice, but back to work I go! Thanks, Jerry