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One of my hobbies is tax optimisation and finding and exploiting tax loopholes. I’m a contractor, I work through my company. It’s way more tax efficient than b
by throwawayacc2 4y ago
One of my hobbies is tax optimisation and finding and exploiting tax loopholes.
I’m a contractor, I work through my company. It’s way more tax efficient than being perm.
But, it could be even more efficient.
So, I did some research. Turn out, where I am, a business can have multiple business codes. Activities the company is registered as performing. Now, I was and still am a software development company. But I also added artistic production as a business code.
Why artistic productions? Well, because it’s the most liberal business code for expenses.
As a software company, I can expense travel for some things, the most useful for me being conferences. But that means I need to buy the conference ticket even if I’m not interested and can only expense accommodations for the duration of the conference. That’s good but a bit restrictive.
Now, as a artistic production company, I’m not limited by that. As long as I can prove I traveled in order to produce, well, just about anything that can be construed as being art, I can expense travel and I can expense accommodations for as long as I need. You can’t rush art, you know how it is.
So, obviously, first thing I did, I whipped up a blog, posted some random pictures every day and called it good. I’m not using company money to travel the world you see, I’m using company money in order to produce art. Haven’t paid a euro of my own money on accommodation or travel for close to a year now. And the best part, I get to deduce this from my profit.
I love the tax system. I really do.
But, doing this, I got curious. I thought, hey, why not make it better. So I thought let’s see what all the rage is with dalle and stable diffusion and all that. So, what I’m doing now is, I’m changing my approach. My art will no longer be just pictures taken quickly with my iphone. No no. I’m getting the picture and I’m sending it to an API I built. The API runs some computer vision, labelling what it sees, some classification, some stuff with the pic metadata, tries to put it all together and turns it into a description of the picture.
The description of the picture I took is used as a prompt for stable diffusion. And that result ends up being the art. I’d like to thank of my art as a modern commentary on the age old “is art imitating life or is life imitating art?” - At least that’s what I told my accountant and he concerned, it would stand up in the case of an audit!
So, yeah, tldr, I’m working on image to text and text to image to expense my nomad lifestyle on the company.
- solardev 4y agoHow much do you end up saving this way, through all that effort, rather than just paying the taxes?
- throwawayacc2 4y agoQuite a bit actually ( for me at least ) seeing as there’s progressive taxation. I’d reckon at least 30k per year. Probably more. I take out only 11k or so per year from the company as personal income. That’s the tax free bracket. The rest I use is just expenses. And I pay myself minimum wage as well. Also tax free, but qualifies me for national insurance :D I love the tax system!
- solardev 4y agoSo you make enough and just don't really want to pay taxes, so it's a fun side hobby? Heh, that's such a foreign mentality to me, but to each their own. Do you think the tax money serves any societal good at all? Is it worth paying any tax or would you rather avoid all of it if you could?
- throwawayacc2 4y agoI will answer your questions but first I want to show you something. It’s the link at the bottom. In the UK there’s something called IR35. Without getting into to much detail, the client will decide if you fall inside or outside. If you are inside or outside you will pay different amounts of tax. Not that long ago I was offered £1000 per day inside. That seemed like a really good rate to me. Or so I thought. In a month, 21 working days, that’s £21k per month, how much can taxes be right? Let’s call it £17k - I mean c’mon, £4k per month in taxes is already ludicrous. I couldn’t possibly be more. Right? Please go to the link and plug in £1000 per day. Look at what it says you get cash in hand at the end of the month and tell me, does that seem ok? Is that tax worth paying? https://www.contractorcalculator.co.uk/insideir35contractorcalculator.aspx https://www.contractorcalculator.co.uk/insideir35contractorc...
- 4y ago