Sign Nebraska Travel Agency Agreement Simple

Document type sign travel agency agreement nebraska simple

[Music] hey guys i'm kayla the travel nurse and today we're going to talk about tax homes so what is a tax home it's a very common question there's a lot of information about tax homes and it can be a little confusing so the simplest answer as it relates to travel nursing is your tax home is your permanent residence in the state you hold a driver's license in it's also the location you're traveling from when you intend to claim business travel expenses on your tax return i'm gonna post here in the video a standard tax home declaration form that you'll get mostly from your travel companies some of them look a little bit differently but all basically the same maintaining your tax home is what allows you to have all these great stipends and reimbursements from your agency traditionally the irs checks for three things when declaring a tax home number one are you living and working in that area at least some of the time number two do you have duplicated expenses when you work somewhere far away from your permanent residence and number three are you meaningfully connected to your permanent residence and the community around it in order to have a tax home at least two of these three things must be true for most travel nurses it's the second and the third factors however as a traveler one factor may qualify you to have a tax home so according to the irs traveling expenses are only deductible if they are incurred as business expenses while someone is away from home being said doing business outside of your tax home isn't the only requirement to claim those reimbursements on top of needing to be away from your tax home irs also requires that your job be temporary and having a temporary job means that you've got reason to believe that you won't be working in that specific location longer than a year so what are duplicated expenses here's an example of a duplicated living expense so let's say you pay a thousand dollars a month for rent or mortgage back home and at your new contract location you're paying 500 a month for rent doesn't matter how much these numbers equate to it just matters that you're paying for living expenses at two different locations now even though you're going to be away from your home for 13 weeks or however long your contract is you're still expected to pay that thousand dollars a month to maintain your home so if you take the thousand dollars a month you're paying in rent back home the 500 a month for your rent on contract those together would equate to a duplicated living expense so travel nurses usually have a permanent residence that they pay rent to or pay a mortgage on and at the same time when you're on a contract you're usually renting an airbnb or subletting an apartment or you may even live in an rv and all those costs associated with that second residence that's temporary wherever you're contracted to that's an expected expense but it also provides that duplication of housing expenses so because you have a duplicated expense with housing you qualify for all the stipends and reimbursements that are offered by your company and these are the same stipends that we discussed in the last video and any reimbursements offered by the company would be things like your travel to the contract and licensure fees those are very common reimbursements now what happens if you don't own or rent your own place yourself you have another option you can always rent a room from a friend or a family member but you have to pay fair market value for that room or that space for renting and if you have shared living expenses such as electric bill water bill internet etc you have to be able to show proof of those as well some people will put the utilities in their name just to show proof that they do reside at that residence and that they do pay those bills so you have that option as well otherwise if you were paying rent and you were paying half of the utilities you could always have your landlord your friend or your parent whoever you're staying with write you a receipt every month as a paper trail to show proof that you are paying those bills so in the irs publication 463 they clearly define tax homes and who qualifies for them so essentially the irs wants you to declare your tax home as the primary state or area that you're holding business or holding a job or the you know the place you work but there is a little excerpt in there which i'm going to put on the screen here about what you do if you have no main place of business or work so if you don't have a main place of business or work you may still have a tax home your tax home may be the home where you regularly live so this is nice because this is applicable to the majority of travel nurses a lot of travel nurses do not carry per diems back home there's just no need you're always on the road you're always traveling there are nurses who do that who do maintain per diems back home for whatever reason and in that case you're fine you're still covered how long can you stay at an assignment in one location that's a very common question i reached out to a bunch of my recruiters i scoured the internet i checked the irs and i finally found an answer so the consensus is that you cannot stay in one location greater than 12 consecutive months in a 24 month period what happens if you really like a place and you want to stay as long as humanly possible what happens if you want to go home or go to another contract and then come right back there is a way to restart the clock according to natho they have decided that one contract length or 13 weeks away from the contract location is a sufficient amount of time to restart that clock because the irs rules for restarting the clock are very vague the irs specifically says three weeks is not long enough 30 days is questionable unless you're working a per diem seven months is an adequate amount of time so natto decided to just split the difference and said 13 weeks or the equivalent of one contract length is plenty and then you can come back let's say you don't have a permanent residence or a tax home what do you do well if you don't have a tax home you don't rent you don't pay a mortgage you have no one to live with no utilities no bills nothing to prove that you are a resident of a specific area you are what is known as an itinerant worker an itinerant worker is someone who travels around temporarily but does not qualify to receive tax-free stipends you really are a true nomad and that being said your tax home would be wherever you were working which would vary every single contract so in order to receive all those stipends and reimbursements that again we talked about in the last video and that we talked about earlier here you have to have a tax home what can you declare on your taxes as a traveler i'm going to lead this by saying you really need to invest an accountant who specializes in travel taxes i'm actually going to make another video about this but i will link some resources in the description box down below for you to look it up since it's almost tax time anyway and that might be very useful and beneficial to you now but as of 2018 travelers can no longer deduct travel related expenses however you should still keep detailed receipts for auditing reasons to prove some of the deductions that you do claim and or if the laws change again as a traveler prior to the law change in 2018 you used to be allowed to claim itemized expenses just food gas meals licensure fees now the only way to recoup that money spent is through your stipends and through the reimbursements that are provided by your company and each company will reimburse you for different things all you have to do is ask you also can't deduct differences in housing stipends and actual housing costs so if you spend twenty five hundred dollars a month and the agency only gives you two thousand dollars a month and you pay that five hundred dollars out of pocket you can't deduct or claim that five hundred dollars now you could have done this prior to 2018 but like i said the laws have changed so that's no longer an option i also mentioned auditing being audited sucks i was audited my very first year of travel because my company was under taxing me they weren't even taxing me the minimum federal tax i had no idea about anything um for me i was very fortunate because it fell back on the company but i did get audited so i i did have to prove um you know that i had duplicated expenses i had to prove that i had travel expenses i had to show receipts i i mean i had to go through the whole thing there was no penalization on my part but i did have to i guess defend myself to an extent but financially the agency was the one at fault and responsible for fixing everything the key here is documentation document document document it's just like in our nursing practice if you didn't document it it didn't happen must be able to show a paper trail of your duplication of travel expenses and all of your business expenses that you incur along the way keep copies of all of your receipts even things like airfare costs baggage fees mileage that you drive tolls hotels rental car receipts anything that it takes to get to and from anything that any bills that you incur while you're away on business as it relates to your business um those things need to be kept and also you need to keep copies of all of your contracts the actual contracts themselves um that's just a side note but just keep copies of everything because again you could be audited up to seven years down the road and i don't know about you but i'm not gonna remember seven years from now like how much money i spent on gas getting from florida to i don't know nebraska you know um and why i claimed x amount of dollars and how i could prove that so always keep everything i have like a little envelope that i write where i'm going um like for here i wrote michigan and then i wrote the month in the year and then i keep it down in my door so when i'm traveling and i stop for gas i get my receipt and i put it right into the envelope i do that for toll bills i do that for the gas receipts for when i buy food and then if i stay at a hotel or an airbnb i'll get the receipt and i'll fold it up and i'll put it in the envelope so then everything is in my envelope self-contained and all i do is put it in my file folder and hold on to it until i get back home and then once i get home i transfer it over into my file folder box that i keep that's categorized per contract and then when it's tax time i just pull out that envelope i scan everything over to my accountant done easy peasy that way nothing gets lost everything's organized it seems to be a good system that works personally for me so if you think that would work for you go ahead and implement it i think it would be you know a great idea to try on your next contract i hope that i added some clarification and i didn't further confuse you about what a tax home is i will see you in the next video good luck and happy [Music] travels