Firefighter and ambulance meal deduction facts

There is a pervasive myth within the emergency services professions regarding a tax deduction for meals during their on-shift days.

This myth is most common with the firefighter ranks, but is also seen within ambulance, police, and other emergency services professions.

Where this myth comes from, I’m not certain. But it definitely maintains it’s urban legend status due to being passed from one person to another. It can only be assumed that tens of thousands of emergency services personnel illegally take this deduction every year.

So let’s set the record straight: There is no on-shift meal deduction permitted for emergency services personnel.

It doesn’t matter if you work a 24-hour shift, and it doesn’t matter what you do for a living (this isn’t limited to emergency personnel, it’s EVERYBODY): If you’re at your job, in your home area, regardless of shift length, there is no meal deduction. Period.

Meal deductions, including per diem (Meals and Incidental Expenses – M&IE), are only permitted when you travel away from home for business or work, and are not reimbursed. If you actually get paid per diem, you can’t also deduct it (no double dipping, in other words).

Here is what firefighters and other workers can do, however. Some fire stations, police stations, and other work places where it is common to work long shifts have what is called a common meal fund. Basically, everybody pitches in a certain amount of money per day, and it pays for food for the entire crew for that day.

If everybody does it, and it’s required by the employer, then it’s deductible. In other words, your fire department or other agency must have made it a mandatory participation practice. In this case, the money you put into the food bucket every day is deductible on Form 2106 under Miscellaneous Deductions, which are subject to a “floor” of 2% of your Adjusted Gross Income.

Hopefully this will clarify this practice. If you work in emergency services, do your co-workers a favor, and refer them to this blog post — it may help them avoid an “undesired IRS interaction.”… Continue reading

Friday Q&A: Client payment plans for tax resolution fees

It’s one of the most critical questions in the tax resolution industry: To accept or not to accept client payment plans for fees.

I’ve written quite a bit about fee structures and payment arrangements, and this morning Danny sent me an email with several questions pertaining this topic:

How many months do you allow someone to pay? What sort of upfront fee do you collect? Do you use an online auto bill to their credit card? Do you have a written agreement and do you file the agreement?

Let me first start with this: I no longer offer payment plans to clients, and I advise other solo practitioners not to, either. My stance is that if a client wants my help, and cannot pay my full fee up front, then that client does not meet my established criteria for my ideal clients. When you are a solo practitioner in particular, you should set fairly strict criteria regarding the clients you will work with. When it’s only you, you should be far less willing to deal with problem clients, and you don’t have to.

Please note that this entire article really applies to those doing flat-fee client work (aka, value billing). If you are billing hourly against a retainer, then most of this will not apply to you, because these tips are sort of built in to the retainer model.

With that said, if you either choose to accept payment plans from clients, or own a larger firm and are going after the volume angle in order to compete on the playing field with the large national firms (which is perfectly OK, of course), then you should set strict guidelines regarding your fee payment arrangements.

First of all, collect as much of the fee up front as possible. Never go for a series of equal payments over time — always insist on the first payment being significantly larger. The reason for this should be obvious: Tax resolution work is heavily front-loaded in terms of your time commitment to the client. It’s not uncommon for half your billable hours on a tax resolution case to occur within the first week of a client hiring you. Collect enough in the initial payment to cover this work.

Second, whatever payment arrangements you do make, automate it. In other words, set up the payments on automatically recurring ACH drafts or credit card drafts, so that you don’t even have … Continue reading

How I get inbound tax resolution leads with no marketing

In a typical week, I get at least one, and sometimes as many as three or four, people contacting me completely out of the blue that are telling me that they think I’m the best person to help them with their tax problem and wanting to hire me.

These are folks that I’ve never talked to before, never marketed to before, never had any one on one contact with at all. But they’re reaching out to me, with their checkbook open.

How is this possible?

It’s actually quite simple: I took the time to establish myself as an expert.

Never forget that people do business with other people that they know, like, and trust. This is the single most important thing you can ever learn about running a service business. Period.

Establishing yourself as an expert, as the go-to person in your area or specialization, you automatically build credibility. Providing ways for people to get to know you, even if you never actually speak to them, builds on this. Over time, people that know you will get to like you and trust you (assuming you’re likable and trustworthy, of course).

People get to know you via the content that you produce. On my tax firm web sites, I provide a ton of free or extremely low-cost information for people, including how to negotiate their own Installment Agreements and how to draft their penalty abatement applications. I also provide pointers to appropriate IRS resources and other information that can help them.

This material costs me nothing but time in order to create. After the initial creation of a few backlinks to those sites via press releases, articles, or videos I post elsewhere ,I do no further active promotion of those sites, I just let Google and Bing find them on their own and determine whether they are worth including in search results or not. I don’t try to “game” the search engines, and I update the sites far less frequently than the so-called SEO “experts” say that I should.

It also helps that a little over a year ago, I took the time to write a short book and self-publish it on Amazon. That book is now one of the best selling books on Amazon on the subject of settling tax debts. The end of every chapter includes a call to action referring back to my primary practice web site, which offers additional resources. … Continue reading