Employing Family Members

Abstract

One of the greatest tax benefits of owning your own business is finding ways to transform personal, non-deductible expenses into deductible business expenses. A great non-tax benefit of owning your own business is that you are the boss and get to decide how you run that business— including whom you hire as an employee. In this chapter these two benefits meet and combine to form a powerful tax-saving strategy. Hiring family members as legitimate employees of your business can bring significant savings on your tax return. The tax available to you will depend mostly on what member of your family you employ, and as such, the strategies in this chapter are broken up into three main categories: