Home office deductions at tax time can be a beautiful thing, however you’d better be careful if you use them.  While justified expenses are truly an expense that should be deducted, the IRS will cast a close eye on those using home office deductions.  From Reuters, you’d better watch out,

Exclusive use. The home office must be a designated home office that is used exclusively for the trade or business. You can’t deduct a guest bedroom that is used half of the year by your in-laws. There are some exceptions to this, such as daycare facility use (with some special rules), certain storage use and rental use.

Remember while the deductions are okay, they can be risky. This link to the IRS provides very specific instructions on home office deductions.‘

Photo from wine press for words.

A start-up company won the Facebook contract to produce and distribute business cards to look like the social networking site’s new timeline.  Moo.com is offering to print and ship free business cards to the first 200,000 users – or approximately 10 million cards.

The cards can feature a different photo image on the front of the cards together with a favourite quote or saying on the reverse. This will doubly act as a promo for Facebook’s Timelime as people will be able to take snapshots of their lives from their Timelines and put them onto the cards.

Facebook spokesperson Jillian Stefanki says “The MOO.COM integration makes it possible for people to take [the Timeline] experience with them offline.”

Always suspicious, I went in and looked.  I was one of 200,000 so am getting 50 business cards for free! I didn’t like the profile picture it’s using, but for free cards I will live with it!

Dangling a carrot for added work is nice.  Except when they never pay up.  I learned that years ago in a former high-stress position.  That and other little things eventually added up to the point that my company lost my trust, my energy, my excitement for the job.  I went through the motions of the job, all the time focusing my best efforts on finding other employment.

Today’s companies are giving their workers more work for less money.  This tactic will catch up with the employers according to Doug the Headhunter in his post A Word of Caution for Employers.  When a strong job market returns, the employees will be racing to other jobs,

When things were really bad people were happy to just have a job and they would put up with a lot to remain employed. But the employment market in power generation, especially in the nuclear industry, is improving and as things get better employers that took advantage of that situation are going to find themselves conducting a lot of exit interviews.

How has your job been this past year or two?  Stressful?  Piled on work?  Will you be remaining with your current boss in the coming five years or looking for something else?

Photo by cyn74 via Flickr Creative Commons.

While there are a lot of great entrepreneurial jobs for people to do from home, sometimes it’s necessary for folks to just pick up and grab a part-time or seasonal job to help make ends meet.  While a great concept, landing that job may be harder than you’d think.

A friend of mine is a hiring manager at our area Target stores and she recently shared some really good advice.  If you’re applying online or at a store kiosk, they will ask when you are available to work.  Answer ALL THE TIME. This way your application won’t get automatically thrown out because only night hours are available that day your application hits.

Once you get your foot in the door and can get to the interview stage, your hours are negotiable.  If the store really wants you because you’ve made a great impression as a hard worker, they will negotiate the hours that you are scheduled to work.

Click here for more tips from MSNBC.com that could help, including:

Be positive and upbeat on job interviews. In the survey of hiring managers, three out of 10 said they viewed a positive attitude as the most important trait in any prospective employee. Employers also like to see previous experience — but an enthusiastic, can-do attitude can get you noticed more than you might imagine.

Good luck job hunters!

Photo from Eastern Washington University via Flickr Creative Commons.

When I worked for a government affiliated agency, my hours were 9:00 to 5:00, although my time there was actually more like 8:00 – 6:30. They were long, hard days punctuated by an occasional day off.  When I was off work, it always struck me how many cars were out and about and I wondered, “Doesn’t anybody have a job?”

So when Steve titled a post with this exact question, I had to laugh.

If you go to Costco or Bloom (a grocery store) during the day, there are a lot of people there.  There are cars on the road.  There are people out and about all day long, and I always wonder – are these people who don’t work, or who work irregular hours, or who work at home?  How can there be so many people out and about from 9 to 5?

While he doesn’t have an answer to that question, I think part of the reason is there are a lot of people who work different shifts.  I also really wonder about how many live on the government dollar – welfare, social security, disability, etc.

Steve also provides a link with tips on finding a job, including:

Sincerity is important when networking, as is helping others. You are looking for help from others, so you should be prepared to help others. If you can introduce people who might work out for each other, do so. You can also answer questions and mentor.

Very true.  They say most jobs can’t be found in the newspaper or on job boards, but form knowing people. Good luck!

Last night President Barack Obama offered his first State of the Union Address. One of the main issues addressed in the speech was employment. The jobs situation remains precarious, and the President wants to show that he is listening to the concerns of the people. As a result, it is little surprise that he offered some plans to encourage increased job creation, including a plan for tax breaks for companies willing to hire more workers.

In addition to addressing employment, the President also stressed the need to develop alternative energy technologies. He also talked of education reform, health care reform and financial regulatory reform. He also made sure to take responsibility for his mistakes, as well as point out that some things couldn’t be avoided, and that there is still a ways to go.

In the end, it will be interesting see whether any of his ideas can be put into play. While the President does have some influence over the direction of some policies, the bottom line is that actual legislation is in the hands of others.

The mess surrounding the heath care “reform” debate continues. Republicans received good news with the win in Massachusetts by Scott Brown, who will fill the Senate seat vacated by the late Edward Kennedy. This changes things up a bit, and may force some serious looking at the current reform bill that the Senate has put forward. It differs on some very key points from the bill passed by the House, so the two chambers are trying to reconcile the differences. One of the big differences is an excise tax on health insurance benefits.

Here is what the New York Times reports about a possible excise tax:

The excise tax, as written in the Senate version of the health care bill, would impose a 40 percent charge on the value of health benefits above $8,500 for individual policies and $23,000 for family policies, with higher thresholds for certain high-risk jobs, some retirees and certain telecommunications workers. There would also be a higher threshold in certain states with high health care costs.

For those who pay for their insurance as self-employed folks, this tax probably won’t have a big impact. If your home business is mostly a side business, though, and you get your insurance through another job, you might find yourself staring at an excise tax if your health insurance benefits are valuable enough.

Many people who make money from home are looking toward 2010 and working out how they feel about their prospects. This makes for an interesting look forward. The COUNTRY Financial Security Index measures how people feel about the economy and tracks trends about financial security. It’s pretty evenly split in terms of what people feel about financial prospects for 2010, reports COUNTRY:

As 2009 draws to a close, Americans are almost evenly divided on their future financial predictions for 2010, according to a survey conducted in connection with this month’s COUNTRY Financial Security Index^®. Twenty-nine percent say things will be better, 28 percent say things will be worse and 32 percent think the status quo will prevail.

It’s an interesting look at the general attitudes in the country. I, personally, think that mine will stay pretty close to the same. The recession didn’t have much of an effect on my freelance home business, and I doubt things will change much for me.

Where do you fit in? Are you hopeful for a better year in your personal economy?

You’ve probably seen those ads claiming that you can “Use Google to make 1000s of Dollars!” Those ads (which charge hefty monthly fees when you send in payment information for a “startup kit”) are the result of Pacific WebWorks, a Utah-based company that Google is taking to court. Because the company uses Google’s name and even uses the logo — or something quite similar — in some of the ads, Google feels it has a case.

Google has been the subject of a number of work from home scams, which sometimes even use Google’s own AdWords platform to get the word out. Google is trying to weed out such work from home scams (even those that don’t mention Google) from AdWords and from search engine results. Google also warned against work from home scams, and listed some companies to watch out for that use Google in their names, reports CNN Money:

Legitimate work-at-home jobs are those in which a person is paid a regular wage for services performed or hours worked, such as computer data entry, remote tech support, or transcription services. The illegitimate jobs, or “scams” as Lister refers to them, can usually be identified because they ask job seekers to put up money with the expectation of earning money back.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based Google provided other names users should be wary of: Google Adwork, Google ATM, Google Biz Kit, Google Cash, Earn Google Cash Kit, Google Fortune, Google Marketing Kit, Google Profits, The Home Business Kit for Google, Google StartUp Kit, and Google Works.

As always, it is important to remember that if it seems too good to be true, it most likely is. Be careful of the work from home opportunities that you engage in.

Every year, I participate in Blog Action Day. It’s a program in which bloggers around the world unite and blog about the same cause. This year, the cause is climate change. When one talks about climate change, one also has to talk about energy consumption. One thing you can do in your home office to reduce your own energy consumption is to switch from a desktop computer to a laptop. You can still put your laptop on the desk, if you want, but having a laptop saves energy.

Most laptops are build with LCD displays that are already energy efficient. Additionally, everything about a laptop uses less energy than a desktop. So, instead of buying another desktop to replace your current machine, consider a laptop. Not only will you save energy, but you will also have a more portable home office workstation.

Other things you can do to save energy in your home office include:

* Using power strips that you can turn off at the end of the day.

* Looking for Energy Star appliances for your home office.

* Using lighting that is task-specific.

* If possible, use natural lighting instead of electrical lights.