Tax Strategy Blog for Business Owners

“What does the IRS actually care about? 13 real questions from real business owners and high earners.” This live tax Q&A for business owners and high earners is the full August 2026 session, where CPA and tax strategist Laura Dohanes answered 13 real questions from real owners and investors — no hypotheticals, no “it depends” […]

If you write the check for your long-term care insurance from your personal account, the same way you pay for car insurance or a gym membership, you may be paying for it the hard way. There is a side door most business owners walk right past. Here is the short answer. The IRS treats long-term […]

“At what profit level does the expense of converting to an S-Corp make sense?” The S-Corp profit threshold is one of the most-Googled small-business tax questions — and everyone quotes a different magic number. Quick answer: On structure alone, Laura’s firm finds the S-Corp profit threshold sits somewhere around $40,000–$70,000 of net profit, and by […]

“I earned an additional $70,000 this year — what can I do now to lessen my tax impact? I’m an S-Corp.” S-Corp reasonable compensation is the answer almost nobody leads with. A customs broker running an S-Corp asked what to do with an extra $70,000 of profit this year — and before any deduction, strategy […]

Walter is 54. His self-directed IRA holds a rental property that pays him steadily every month, and for a few years he has been moving pieces of that account into the Roth version, a little at a time, whenever the numbers worked. His thinking was simple: get it into the Roth, let it grow, take […]

If you own a rental, there is a good chance you are sitting on a deduction you never claimed. Not a gray-area deduction. Depreciation you were entitled to, and never took. Missed depreciation on rental property can be caught up in a single adjustment on this year's return. The tax code calls the mechanism a […]

Qualifying your short-term rental was step one. Most owners stop there, take the deduction the default way, and leave the biggest part of it sitting on a schedule that runs for decades. A short-term rental cost segregation study is the second decision, and it controls how big the deduction gets. The study breaks the property […]

This is Part 5 of our series on Section 199A, the qualified business income deduction, or "QBI." We've been running a series for business owners on the 199A deduction — most people know it as the QBI deduction. If you missed any of them, here is what we covered: We were getting some replies from […]

This is Part 4 of a four-part series on Section 199A, the qualified business income deduction, or "QBI." Catch up on Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 first. Is the business having a good year? Great. Here is what decides whether you keep the 20% deduction on it. Two things determine this: how much […]