6 Best Tax Deductions for 2019 to Take Advantage Of

3. Home office

If you’re self-employed and have a home office, you may be able to benefit from some deductions. There are rules though. For starters, the office in your home must be exclusively used for business. If it’s in a room that you also use as a home gym, or where your kids do their homework, it doesn’t qualify.

The space must also be your principal place of business, or where you meet regularly with customers. (If you’re a salaried employee, you might have been able to take a home-office deduction in the past, via the miscellaneous itemized deduction, but recent tax reforms have eliminated that deduction. Self-employed people can claim the deduction on their Schedule C form.)

To claim a home-office deduction, you’ll need to discover what percentage of your home your office takes up. Once you have that, you can deduct that percent of utilities. Here are some of them:

• electricity and heat
• mortgage interest property taxes
• home insurance
• security expenses
• homeowner association fees
• home repairs
• maintenance expenses

You can also deduct the full cost of a dedicated phone line into the office if you have one, and the full cost of work done on that room, such as painting it. If you pay $10,000 for a new roof for your house and your home office takes up 10% of your house, you may be able to deduct $1,000.