The Independent Musician’s Guide to Not Overpaying Thousands of Dollars in Taxes

March 22nd, 2018 by Justin Colletti

Taxes may be one of the few certainties of modern earnedife, but if you do them right, they don’t have to sting nearly as much. Image by Aaron Parecki.

Nobody really loves paying taxes. It’s not hard to understand why.

Even if you like some of the things you get in return for your tax payments, they are different from almost every other area of your life in that you don’t get too much choice in just how much you want to pay, or what exactly your money gets spent on.

For every tax-funded service you’re grateful to have, I’m sure you can imagine another one you’d prefer to do without. And even for the services that you do like, do they really have to take that much out of your paycheck?

“You don’t pay taxes,” says comedian Chris Rock. “They take taxes.” But for even the most optimistic and patriotically-inclined taxpayer, there’s a constant internal conflict:

“I’m proud to pay taxes in the United States,” once quipped the wholesome 1950s entertainer, Arthur Godfrey. “The only thing is, I could be just as proud for half the money.”

While I can’t promise that this guide will cut your tax payment in half for your studio or creative business, it should help give you some ideas for how to ethically, morally and legally, reduce your tax burden considerably—all well within the law.

Please bear in mind that this guide is not about cheating the system or taking any risky deductions. (No matter how you feel about taxes, the costs of trying to skirt them far outweigh any benefits.) Rather, it’s about learning to do your taxes properly, and without any headaches or dubiously complex schemes.

Step 1 is realizing that it’s OK to save on taxes.

If you’re anything like me, some of your most common stumbling blocks in life are the ones you have put up for yourself. Or, maybe they’re a product of unquestioned assumptions that have been ingrained in you by others from a very young age.

Perhaps there’s a little voice inside your head that tells you that taking a moment to think about saving on taxes is something that only bad people do. Maybe it’s what “greedy” people do, or what criminals do, or what undeservedly rich people or unpatriotic people do.

Is there any truth in that? Perhaps. I’m sure that many greedy, unpatriotic, undeservedly rich criminals like to pay less in taxes if they can. I’m also sure many of them also chocolate ice cream, think puppies make good pets and will agree that broccoli is good for you. Does it stand to reason that you should stay away from all three?

In defense of taxes, you may be familiar with the supreme court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said that taxes are “the price we pay for a civilized society.”

It’s a very popular saying. (Though it’s also worth remembering that he lived at a time when the average tax burden was about 3.5%). But you should become just as familiar with the words of the influential supreme court justice Learned Hand (great name), who also famously wrote:

“Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one’s taxes.

“Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands“.

It makes sense if you think about it:

If you believe that the politicians who created our current tax system were wise and just in setting the tax rates they did, then weren’t they also wise and just in setting all the exclusions and deductions and credits you are eligible for if you start doing your taxes properly?

And if you don’t believe politicians were especially wise in creating our current tax laws (OK, fair point) then why single out one half of the equation and not the other?

Ultimately, the tax deductions are there for the same reasons the taxes themselves are there: To steer more resources toward the kinds of things that politicians think are a good idea. In the case of tax deductions, that often means incentivizing things like investing in your business, taking on new projects, hiring new people or creating housing or energy or food.

If you think that such a system, where politicians seek to steer resources in one direction or another is silly, well, fair enough. But that sounds more like an argument against monkeying around with the economy through taxation in general, rather than an argument against tax deductions specifically.

In any event, I’m glad that we’re civilized enough with each other to have left some escape hatches here and there in the tax code so that actual burden we pay doesn’t have to be quite so high as the sticker price.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of such welcome escape hatches, but we should be able to hit many of the key highlights and get you started thinking, and more importantly, taking action in the right direction so that you can determine for yourself how more of your hard-earned money gets spent.

Part 1. The Universal Deductions

Basic Deductions

Let’s start with the simplest deductions. No matter who you are, even if you’re a person who works as a traditional job (known as a “W2” wage earner in the US) you qualify for these kinds of deductions. Unfortunately, there’s not a ton of them, at least compared to the deductions possible for small businesses and freelancers. More on that in a minute.

First, there’s the “standard deduction” of $12,000 for a single person or $24,000 for a married couple in the US beginning in the 2018 tax year. (Formerly $6,350 and $12,700 in 2017.) That’s how much of your earnings you don’t have to pay income tax on at all.

You can write off things like charitable deductions and home mortgage interest and property taxes—but only if you have so many such deductions that when you add them up they are higher than the “standard deduction”. If so, you can then “itemize” you deductions, spelling them out in full to potentially increase your total basic deduction.

In general, only higher income earners and people who own very expensive homes will benefit from doing this—and especially so going forward from here now that the standard deduction for US readers will be much higher in 2018.

Other Simple Deductions

For traditional employees, one obvious way to reduce your tax burden is to earn less in salary and more in benefits. In lieu of a cash raise, you can bargain for a more generous health plan, an expense account, a company car and the like. There’s a good chance some of these things will cost the company less to provide than an equivalent cash raise, and may be worth just as much or more to you.

People who have bigger roles or work with smaller companies will often have more bargaining power in this area than people who work in smaller roles or at bigger companies. But even in the latter case, you may still have a menu of predetermined options to choose from, so it’s something to consider.

Regular workers can claim travel and meal expenses and the like, but if you’re an employee it’s often a much better bet to get these things expensed by your company—particularly meals. Business meals may only be 50% tax deductible to you as a wage earner, but in many cases, they could be 100% deductible to your company.

There are also ways to claim a home office deduction as a regular wage earner, but it’s much more limited than for a freelancer or small business owner. (We’ll get to the home office deduction in a minute. It’s awesome for musicians and audio people.)

If you plan on starting a family, there are tax credits available for each child you have to help lighten the load. Tax credits are nice because you get back the entire amount of the credit. This is unlike deductions, where you just avoid the taxes you would have paid on that income.

If you’re just getting started out, there’s also an “earned income tax credit” for lower and lower-middle wage earners, to help keep the dole from looking too enticing compared to the workaday world. And if you’re smart about properly using your tax deductions in other areas, you may be able to qualify for this credit longer than you might expect as you get started in the working world.

Retirement Plan Deductions

In addition to these basic deductions, anyone can shelter some of their income from taxes by investing through a 401(k) or a Traditional IRA retirement account.

I’m not a big fan of these two however, because they are not really tax savings vehicles. They are really tax deferment vehicles. You still pay taxes—and potentially even more taxes—you just pay them later on in your life.

Here’s the pitch they make: You can put up to $5,500 into a Traditional IRA. You can put in more if you’re over 50 or if you’re looking at an employer-based 401(k) plan. But let’s keep it simple and call it a $5,500 deduction. This allows you to take an instant tax deduction on up to that amount.

If you are a middle income earner who falls into the Federal 25% tax bracket, that means you could potentially save 25% off that $5,500, which is like keeping an extra $1,375 in your pocket! Not bad at all. And that’s not counting any tax savings you may have at the state or local level. Great.

Here’s the problem: When you do get older and go to take the money out, you no longer get taxed at the attractively low “long-term capital gains rate” for investments. That is often from just 0%-15%, depending on your income. You instead get taxed at your full tax rate of 25%. Maybe more!

The situation can be even worse in reality: When you’re older, you may be in an even higher tax bracket due to inflation, or simply due to being reasonably successful in your career and your investing. Now, you’re paying a rate of 25% or higher rate on all the earnings you take out, instead of a rate of 15% or lower. And you ‘re paying that rate on a much larger amount! Yikes. Where did my tax deduction go?

Some people will argue that these vehicles are a good idea because you’re likely to earn less when you’re older and therefore, be in a lower tax bracket.

Hmmmm. I don’t know about you, but I plan on being wealthier in my 60s than I was in my 20s or am in my 30s. I don’t plan on being poorer. I hope you have a similar plan.

Also, seeing the reality of “bracket creep” (the tendency for people to get put into higher and higher tax bracket just due to inflation) if things keep on going as they have been, I’m not at all confident that my taxes will be lower in 30 years, even if I do turn out to be poorer by then!

If you do want one of these retirement accounts, I have come to prefer a Roth IRA for my own purposes. With a Roth IRA, you pay the taxes before you put the money in, but you take out all the earnings tax free when you’re older. (And due to the beauty of compound interest, those gains can be considerable over time.)

Also unlike with a Traditional IRA or 401(k), you can even take out the initial amount you’ve contributed to a Roth IRA—penalty free and tax free—if an even better opportunity presents itself within your own business.

This is one place where I prefer to take a bigger tax deduction later, rather than a smaller tax deduction now. I’ve written a pretty detailed post about IRA and 401k investing for musicians and creative professionals if you want more detail on these kinds of investments.

That said, a lot of people will argue for maxing out your 401(k), and they’re not necessarily wrong, especially if you are an employee with a company has a “matching” program, where they will match a portion of your contributions. That can be much more of a no brainer to take advantage of.

There are other plans, like an ESA Educational Savings Account for college expenses that operate similar to an IRA. But for what it’s worth, I’m skeptical of these as well, in part because I’m not sure that “college” as we currently know it, will be around in 10 years, much less 20!

Alternatives to Retirement Plans

You shouldn’t think that these kinds of government-sanctioned retirement plans are the only vehicles for investing. You can invest money into vehicles that are far more tax-friendly than a traditional brokerage account—and that don’t tie up all you options until you’re ready to retire.

The best place to put investible money, as we’ll discover soon, is into your own studio or music business. If you structure your business properly, investments in your workspace, your infrastructure, and even the audio gear you covet, can all be tax deductible expenses.

But before we get to special deductions available for freelancers and small business owners, there are a few other investment areas that anyone can participate in and get tax advantages while doing so. The most popular of them is probably investment real estate.

We’re going to stay on this topic for a moment, because it offers far more lessons for music business owners than you may expect.

First, getting into real estate investing may be easier than you think, and it may take less money to get started than you expect. This is especially true if you:

1) Are a first time homebuyer and qualify for certain programs,
2) If you can show a bank, investors or relatives that your investment property should likely be profitable,
3) If you take the “house hacking” approach and buy a home or duplex that you will live in and rent part of, or
4) If you’re very handy around the house and often have time in between music projects.

In fact, the norm in real estate is to use some “leverage”, which is basically just a fancy word for “other people’s money”. Very few people, even people of significant means, acquire property using only their own money. (Spoiler alert: The same is true of many or most sustainable studios and small businesses.) Ultimately, coming up with worthwhile, profitable plans and investing in each other is how civilization is even possible—not to mention, one with enough wealth to engage in creating recorded music.

The tax advantages here can be significant. When you invest in say, a rental property, a huge portion of that investment becomes tax deductible. All of a sudden, you can write off all your related expenses: Your full mortgage and mortgage interest, your property taxes, your repairs and improvements and everything you have to do to bring the property up to snuff or to maintain it. You can even deduct the expense of having someone else answer phone calls and unclog toilets for you!

Some of these expenses can be spread out (or “depreciated“) over a longer time period, giving you an extra tax deduction each year. You can also have short term losses in this area offset your gains in other areas. And if you can’t use all these losses in one year, you can even carry them forward into future years when you are making a profit. That’s nice.

One catch with real estate investing is that you want to find a property that is very likely to be profitable to own for the long term. You can’t just buy something and hope it will “go up” in value just “because that’s what real estate does”.

Obviously, that is not the case. (See 2008 for instance.) Real estate prices still haven’t recovered from their 2006 peak in many areas when you price it in something flexible, like dollars. And priced in something a little more rigid in supply, like gold, they’re still down roughly 65%. So you have to buy smart.

When you’re looking for an investment property, you have to buy something that you can reasonably expect will pay you more in rental income than it costs in all its expenses to own and maintain. Alternately, you could find a property that is inexpensive because it needs work, and where you can be reasonably sure that once it’s fixed up, you can sell it for a price that is higher than the amount it costs to buy and fix up.

Those are the only surefire ways to come out ahead in the long term. You should never buy a bad investment just because it can help you save on taxes.

You’re only doing the greatest service you can to yourself (and to the rest of humanity for that matter) if you find projects that are profitable to take on over the long term. If you can’t, it means end users don’t really want what you’re selling. And what’s the point of a house nobody can sensibly live in?

Incidentally, if you take the question “what’s the point of a song nobody wants to listen to?” into your music career, you’ll also be well-served. And that’s one of two reasons we’ve dwelled so long on real estate in an article about music and audio business:

1) Houses are easy for most people to understand, and if you can really understand all the basic concepts mentioned above, you can do just fine in any business. Even in music and sound. And:

2) Of all the people I’ve met who have had made a lot of money in music, a surprising number of them actually made a lot of their money by being smart about real estate. Then, they used some of the gains, income or leverage there to help support or ratchet up their endeavors in music. It’s not true of everyone in music by any means, but you too may find that it is true of a surprising number.

If you live in an overpriced area at the moment and can’t find any good real estate investments near you, don’t worry. There’s an even better place to invest money in your own back yard: Into your business.

Yes, if you can make the leap from wage earner to freelancer and then to business owner, the possibilities for saving on taxes while you invest open up dramatically.

Part 2. The Freelancer’s Deductions

It’s not easy having a career in music, in audio or any other art form. But one of the benefits we do get is that we potentially have many more deductions available than your average office drone.

Once you’re a freelancer, you can start to write off all sorts of added expenses. But you have to know what they are, and how to safely claim them.

A great thing about switching your work status from “employee” to “freelancer” or “small business owner” is that you are able to start paying yourself and your helpers first, and the taxman second.

For a standard employee, a tradeoff of having a predictable paycheck and all that jazz is that your cashflow looks a little something like this most of the time:

Income–>Taxes–>Expenses

But for a freelancer—and even more so for a small business owner—your cashflow can start to look a little more like this:

Income–>Expenses–>Taxes

Which sounds better to you? Personally, I’d prefer to expand my business and take on more projects, and then pay the taxman with what’s left over, rather than operate the other way around.

Here are some of the big deductions for freelancers, in broad strokes:

The Home Office Deduction: Your Studio is a Tax Break!

You know that home studio of yours? The one you obsessively tool around in all the time? Yeah, that can be a big old tax deduction right there.

While it’s possible for a regular worker to claim a home office deduction, you have a lot more control and ability to do so as a freelancer who files a “Schedule C” tax return.

It’s not uncommon for freelancers to legitimately claim anywhere from 10% to 30% of their home-related expenses as tax-deductible home office expenses if they are really being used that way. If anything, many audio and music people I know use more than that! Sometimes audio can practically consume a life. I’ve actually erred on underreporting just how much of my home I really and routinely use for my work.

Just be sure you can show that you primarily and regularly use those areas for your work, and that you aren’t constantly losing money at your “profession” year after year. You can’t claim tax deductions for a hobby, and you can’t lie on your tax return year after year and expect it to never catch up with you.

Naturally, you can also write off the expense of keeping an outside office space, whether you rent a conventional office, maintain a membership at a co-working space, or are booking time at a great recording or mix studio.

Equipment Deductions: Your Gear is a Tax Break!

Ah, gear, gear, gear. You want it, you love it, and when it’s a tax write off, you can have more of it!

There are several nice things about outfitting your studio with more audio gear:

1. If it really helps you do your job better and become more productive or more marketable, it can make sense to buy even without a tax deduction.

2. When you’re using your audio gear to make a living, you can write it off as a tax deduction. If you’re paying 25%-30% in taxes, then buying gear for business is kind of like waking up to find a 25%-30% off sale every day.

3. You are usually able to depreciate your gear, meaning you can stretch the tax savings across multiple years.

4. Owning gear can actually be a tax-advantaged way of investing.

How so? Think about it this way:

If you take your profits and stick them in the bank, you get taxed on the amount you put in the bank. It’s considered “profit”. But if you buy audio gear instead, that’s not considered profit. It’s considered an expense, and you can deduct it from your taxes instead.

It gets better, too: If you buy a new, used or vintage piece of gear that is likely to hold its value or even increase in value against inflation, that’s like getting a tax deduction for investing. That’s something you normally can’t do when putting your money in stocks or bonds or precious metals. Gear is also more fun to play with, and can potentially help you increase your rates and get better sounds.

If you buy right, your gear can actually do a better job of keeping up with or beating inflation than sticking money in the bank. This is especially true today, a time when real interest rates are often effectively negative.

What does that mean? Well, if your bank pays you less in interest than there is inflation, then you’re actually losing money over the long term, even if your bank balance looks 1% bigger on paper at the end of the year.

Making matters worse, you get taxed on the amount of money you put in the bank, and you get taxed on the amount of interest you earn on it, even though you are effectively losing money in real terms. Yikes.

The tax deductibility of equipment doesn’t just apply to audio gear however. It can also apply to business devices like phones, laptops, cameras and more. Just as long as they are for actual use in your business, rather than for indulging in your video game addiction or taking vacation photos.

Meals, Concerts, Conventions and Travel: Rocking Out Is Tax Deductible!

Business meals are tax deductible up to 50%. So is entertainment. That’s great because, especially in the early and most energetic stages of you career, you should be out there getting face-to-face with potential clients as often as you can. Pretty much, whenever you’re not working or spending time with family.

So get out there and go to shows, treat a mentor to lunch, order in pizza for the crew, and maybe add on a round of drinks too. Just make a note on the receipt about who you were with and what the business purpose was in case you are audited.

Travel is also deductible. Things like lodging and plane fare and rental cars are fully deductible. And travel expenses on your own vehicle can be deducted too.

Subscriptions, Utilities, Education and more

There’s a lot more that you can write off. What about a Spotify subscription? If it’s there to help you reference commercially released tracks against your own, that’s a tax deduction right there.

What about an Adobe Creative Cloud account or a plugin subscription, or a Netflix subscription for the lounge or for keeping up with trends in sound design? All tax deductible.

What about taking a totally awesome professional development course like Mixing Breakthroughs to improve your skills and start earning more money??? Yes. Ca-Ching. Tax deduction. (You’re welcome!)

Other business utilities like phone and internet can also be written off. Just don’t plan on writing off your whole entire home internet and phone expenses for a home office or home studio. Even if you are a total luddite when you’re outside of the studio, the IRS probably won’t believe you.

Self Employment Tax: Not the Boogeyman it’s Made Out To Be

The flip side of these tax deductions is the fact that we freelancers have to pay the dreaded “Self Employment Tax”. But I’m not too worried about that.

As we’ll see in section 3 on small businesses, there are ways around paying too much of this tax at all, if you incorporate or form an LLC. But in addition to that, the so-called “self employment tax” is not really an added tax for self-employed people at all. Standard wage earners pay it too. They just lie to themselves and pretend that they don’t!

It works like this: In addition to your Federal tax, and state and local income taxes if applicable, there’s this pesky “payroll tax”. Those are the taxes that go to pay for things like the older generations’ social security and medicare.

(I say they go to pay for the “older generations'” social security, because if you’re under 50, even the US government doesn’t expect social security to be around for you in its current form. Their own reports project that social security will run out of money by 2034.)

In any event, there is indeed a 15.3% payroll tax in addition to Federal taxes for all Americans as of this writing, that apply to all wages under $200,000 or so. For regular wage earners, we go the extra step of pretending that half of this amount is “paid by the employer”, and that half is “paid by the employee”.

In the end of course, the economic result is exactly the same. The reality is that your whole take home pay is 15.3% lower, even if you are not self employed. It’s just that you see half of that tax reflected on your paycheck, and half of it reflected in the fact that your paycheck is lower than it otherwise would be. You cost the same to the employer either way. It’s really just a gimmick to help keep half the tax off of wage earners’ paychecks so it doesn’t sting quite so much and they don’t complain quite as much.

But there’s actually a bright side here from self-employed people: You can deduct the “employer’s” portion of your self-employment tax from your income taxes! Payroll taxes are not deductible for regular cubicle-dwellers. But they can be for you.

Part 3: The Business Owners’ Deductions

Once you are ready to take the step of forming your own business entity, the tax benefits can be even greater still.

Remember when I told you that one way to get a tax advantage is to negotiate with your employer to get more in benefits and less in salary, so that you come out ahead once you consider taxes?

Well, when you own the company you are the employer. And I don’t know about you, but when I negotiate with myself, I am occasionally more likely to win.

Let’s go over the main ways of forming an entity:

The Single-Member LLC: Simple Asset Protection

The most basic way to form a business entity is to create a single member Limited Liability Company or “LLC”. This is pretty easy to do, but not too much changes about your tax situation.

The biggest benefit is that an LLC can protect some of your assets in case you are ever sued. If someone sues you over a copyright issue or a safety issue at you studio, they can’t necessarily take your house and your car. And if you someone sues you over a car accident that has nothing to do with your studio, they can’t necessarily liquidate the whole operation and take all its assets—depending on where you form your LLC.

When it comes to taxation, single member LLCs are pretty much just like having a freelance business. All your taxes “pass through” to your personal return. However, you can keep things a little more organized by using your LLC to set up a separate bank account, business credit cards and the like. That way, it’s easy to keep records of all your business expenses and clearly separate them from your personal expenses come tax time.

A multi–member LLC gives you more options. Whether you’re starting a family business or going into business with some colleagues, a multi-member LLC can be taxed like an S corporation or a C corporation, giving you even more tax benefits.

The S Corporation: Save Yourself from Excessive Self-Employment Tax

An S corporation is almost a hybrid of sorts. Like an LLC, all the taxes pass through to you personal tax return, and you pay your personal tax rate. But unlike a single-member LLC, you can have two separate types of income: Regular income and profit.

Your regular income can work just like a normal freelancer’s income would. You pay self-employment tax there. But your profit (which is reported on form K-1) is not eligible for self-employment tax. This can save you over 15% on each dollar that is classified as profit rather than as salary.

Now, before you get too far ahead of yourself and start thinking about taking $1 in salary and $50,000 in “profit”, know that this is not allowed. With an S corp, you have to pay yourself and all owners who actively work in the business the kind of salary that you would have to pay someone else if you weren’t working in the business.

That means that you could potentially pay yourself $30,000 in wages, and take $20,000 in profit, if you can reasonably show that hiring another worker to replace you would cost about $30,000 in wages. And saving 15% on $20,000 is $3,000 in your pocket, so hey. That’s a really nice compressor right there.

The C corporation: Big League Benefits

The C corp is the type of entity that most of biggest businesses you’re familiar with use. Think “C” like “Coca Cola” or “Cisco Systems”.

There are pluses and minuses of a C corporation. The big negative is “double taxation”. When a C corporation earns money, it gets taxed on its profit at the corporate tax rate. Then, that money gets taxed again when it’s distributed to its owners!

Dang. You just got taxed twice on the same money.

That said, this structure can make a lot of sense if you have a fairly big business, earning $250,000 or more.

If you took $250,000 or more in wages and profit through an S corp or LLC, you’d likely pay a fairly high top marginal tax rate on your pass through income. Even with the recent (very tiny) personal tax cuts in the US, you could be paying 35% or more—and that’s not even counting self-employment tax or state and local taxes.

In the past, it wouldn’t have made sense for most businesses in this range of income to switch to a C corporation, because you’d have to pay one of the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world on your earnings, and then pay a fairly high dividend tax rate on top of that.

Now that US corporate tax rates have been significantly lowered to a flat 21% however, the sting of double taxation isn’t quite as bad as it once was. Some business earning $250,000 or more may now benefit from registering as a C corp going forward.

To find out if this is the case for you, talk to you own tax professional. And find a good one who specializes in doing business taxes for people like you! They might cost you a few dollars more than doing it yourself or going to one of the big tax service chains, but chances are they’ll save you much more than they cost. It could be some of the best money you’ll ever spend.

Summing it Up

Thanks for taking this little journey through tax land with me. I’m glad we both made it out alive.

Although we’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about taxes, we’ve just barely scratched the service.

Even though there are many more details to learn—and countless more ways to save than we can go over today—I hope this has gotten your mind turning in the right direction, and has helped you motivate yourself to take action to save more, and to keep more control over how and where your hard-earned money gets spent.

When you keep control over more of your earnings, not only can you do more great things for yourself and your family, but you can do more great things for your business, your clients, your colleagues and your end listeners. You can even direct more of your resources to altruistic endeavors that might just make more of a positive impact on the world than any one-size-fits-all government program ever will.

Whatever your reasons for wanting to save more on taxes are, here’s wishing you good luck, good ideas, and a little bit of patience and serenity come tax time.

Justin Colletti is a mastering engineer, writer and educator.

Please note: When you buy products through links on this page, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Step 1 is realizing that it’s OK to save on taxes.

Part 1. The Universal Deductions

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