Last week I got my tax papers from the company that laid me off. Yesterday Alison Doyle, the Job Search expert at About.com wrote Tax Tips for Job Seekers. Luckily she points to two great resources: job search tax deduction tips from her section of About.com and the tax planning section of About.com.
Ugh! Its time again! Well, get all your stuff together and get moving, better to do it now than wait until April 14th, right?
A premium feature in JibberJobber is the ability to track expenses and mileage, which will be e-mailed to you in a summary format around January 31. Here’s how it works:
- Mouse over Tools and then click on Expense Tracker.
- Enter your mileage or $ expense – categorize it if you want (food, travel, interview, whatever).
That’s it! Pretty easy, huh? (check out this little video tutorial for more) Why in the world did we decide to put this feature in JibberJobber?
Because last year I was talking to a small outplacement firm in Utah that said “it would be sooooooooooo cool if you included a place to track the tax deductible expenses of a job search!” And we did it because (a) it really is quite easy, and (b) I knew I should have been keeping track of my expenses but there was no way I was going to start because come tax time, I knew I’d have lost it all! (I would have used a notebook or Excel spreadsheet, which would have been lost or outdated by now). Look where I’m at now… I haven’t opened my Excel tracking sheet for months because JibberJobber is the tool I use for all of this stuff… and since its the tool I use, I have my expenses here and ready to go!
So go check out Alison’s resourceful post. The only advice I’ll pass along from my accountant (I’m not sure if this is right for you, so check with your accountant) is that the expenses had to be at least 2% of your income. If you had a job seeker’s income (like me), or a student’s income, and you had 1 plane ticket for an interview, its likely that all of your job search expenses are deductible (for example, 2% of $12,000 is $240).
Aren’t using JibberJobber yet? You should be. Haven’t upgraded to Premium yet? You should – there’s a lot more than just the expense tracker that you are missing out on!
Great feature in JibberJobber Jason. I wondered what the heck that was for. LOL. I guess it\’s been a while since I worried about taking deductions on my job search expense. BTW, way back when(read about my last job search) my direct mailing was WAY more than 2%. 😉
Good point Carl. What I didn’t write in this post (because apparently me posts have become too long ;)) is that my accountant/attorney brother told me to track this. I knew it was good advice but I also knew that I’d lose my notes/records by the time tax time came, and it wouldn’t have mattered. So when this outplacement guy recommended it I thought this would be the ideal place to store this data!
Also, note that if you are a small business using JibberJobber for your CRM package you can also use this expense tracker to store the mileage and expenses there – its not QuickBooks by any means but it is a nice, easy place to track this data.