Sharon that looks like you in that bright red. I actually test drove a 69 Mustang when I got my license and my daddy said no way was he letting me drive a muscle car because I'd die in it. You know nowadays though the little electric cars are faster than the muscle cars. For real? Oh gosh you know the Tesla the Model S or the Plaid I think it'll do 0 to 60 in like two seconds. They are they are fast. I mean you know it's interesting but today we're going to be talking about cars. We're going to be talking about utilizing a business car or a car for business. Okay. And you know there's a couple ways to calculate this and a lot of people don't understand this again. You know we're trying to give you general ideas of expenses that you can take as a 1099 CRNA and as long as you're utilizing the car for business and for business purposes you can deduct certain expenses with this. So Sharon let's say you take your car and you drive from your home office to your hospital to give an anesthetic that morning and you drive 30 miles one way. Sounds like exactly what I do. Hey look I'm right on okay so you drive 30 miles there and 30 miles home total is 60 miles right. Well as long as you track that and you have a log or an app there are apps now that track your driving for business purposes or some people just simply write it in a log and stick it in their dash and check it off each day. So you can do that or you can spreadsheet it or whatever but you do have to have written documentation. If the IRS ever asks that's one of the things they're going to want to know do you have written documentation and you better have it because if not they're going to disallow this deduction. So what happens is whatever business mileage that you drove you get 65 and a half cents a mile for that. Well I do both. I still have the little book that I carry and I just stick it in the side pocket in my car and I write down where I'm working at and I have an app. I use QuickBooks self-employed and the phone automatically logs all of your miles. Sometimes it's hit or miss with that whenever I go and check it and so I manually have to put it in but I have got two methods tracking my mileage. And this is the more again sometimes we're about simplification right. This is the more simplified method. You simply track you know what you drive for business. Now remember it is business only mileage. You know if you pull off and you go to Walmart or you drive in on a Friday night you and Pierce go to the drive-in movie theater and make out in the back seat. You know you cannot deduct that. So personal or commuting miles are non-deductible. Right well the self-employed app all my miles will come up and I swipe right for swipe left for business. Yeah that does make life a whole lot easier for sure. So keep that detailed record. Remember that you cannot deduct personal miles on there. So this is one way to do it. Now this method let's say we're going to talk about this later on but let's say you bought the car through the business and you took a deduction for it. In other words you took a tax deduction section 179 or accelerated depreciation. You cannot double dip here. You cannot do both. So this would be a scenario of a non-business car that you did not take a deduction for that you're utilizing for business. The second method is taking actual expenses and which way you come out better it really depends because in this scenario you take all your expenses gas maintenance insurance you can also take depreciation of anything that you did business wise. Okay so what you have to establish here is what percentage of my driving is for business. So you're still kind of tracking your mileage for business versus your mileage for personal. So let me give you a scenario issue. Let's say you drive 30,000 miles a year and 10,000 of those miles are for personal and 20,000 are for business. So in that scenario you can take the percentage of mileage that's attributable to that 20,000. You can take off all your gas, your maintenance, changing the oil, tires, your insurance and so forth can all be a deductible expense. So which way you come out better I don't know. You have to calculate that and look at it but this method again you've got to keep all your receipts all your expenses and if you utilize this vehicle for personal purposes you've got to track that and take that back out of the expense ratio. So let's say you know in that scenario you know you're getting a two-thirds of all your expenses and you spent I don't know that's 20,000 miles let's just say you spent $14,000 in expenses or something. So then you just multiply that $14,000 by that two-thirds or 66.7% and that would be your expense for that year. So do you come out better doing that or do you come out better doing the standard rate? It really just depends on your spending on that vehicle. Now if you've got a vehicle that you put $3,000 worth of tires you're paying you know gas and maintenance and all those you might come out better doing the actual expense. Again that's why the IRS has a simplified method of you know just getting the standard mileage rate because they try to bank all that into the equation. But those are the two methods. Now I will say that I mentioned on the other screen that if you wrote the car off you did a $179 or accelerated depreciation on the car. In other words the business bought the car. You can also take you take that expense up front or over five years on the depreciation but you can also take all these expenses as well. They can deduct gas and oil changes and insurance and all those things that you pay for that car are still deductible expenses because that's ongoing maintenance that goes with the car that's all about business. I know this is a little more detailed but we get so many questions around automobile usage and how to deduct that and how to track mileage and you know what actually can people do. I think it's good to kind of go over this and make sure they understand it.

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