Per Diem Expense Report
 

I went to order my 2018 perdiem expense report from Sabre and was unable. They sent me an e-mail saying the 2018 reports won’t be available to order until the end of January.

The pilot I am flying with tried the same and they told him because of the new changes in the tax laws we can no longer claim those on our taxes.

Just trying to see if anyone knows if this is really the case or what is going on?

Yes, no longer deductible.

Miscellaneous deductions which exceed 2% of your AGI will be eliminated for the tax years 2018 through 2025. This includes deductions for unreimbursed employee expenses and tax preparation expenses. ... These expenses also include unreimbursed travel and mileage, as well as the home office deduction

No use in a per diem report unless your state is one of the few that still allows those deductions for the state income tax portion.

True, but if you're a real estate developer, you got a tremendous tax break, Hmm....

Just saw a post here recently...guy walked in to the Accountant's office, said he was a pilot...Accountant told him, without even asking any details, that he was going to be screwed on his taxes this year. My biggest deduction was $18K for perdiem...all gone...

The middle class got screwed by that bill. Pilots and transportation workers even more so. It was a bill designed to help large corporations and their owners, not the employees of those corporations.

And while we subsidize the uber rich, our children will be the ones to suffer the consequences.

I haven't been able to use the per diem expense from flightline for years..Once you get to a certain income you cannot deduct it. I think most Delta pilots already fall into this category.

How did you ever have an $18k per diem deduction?

I really thought I was going to get screwed this year. Did a preliminary run on my taxes and will do much better than last year. I am no longer subject to the AMT which is huge and the lower brackets help. Went from usually owing 5 to 6k a year to a substantial refund.

Yeah but how about your total taxes year over year? Did the total go down?

Guessing youre talking about AMT, which was significantly raised such that most of us shouldn't have to deal with it.

I was able to save quite a bit with per diem each year, though I can't give you any numbers. I was just starting to pay AMT.

I think the biggest difference for me is the cap on state and local taxes. Hadn't assumed it would be a big issue living in Georgia, but when I added it up, I'm losing a huge deduction.

Quick math shows I will be a few percent ahead of last year on total taxes, mostly due to having 3 school age kids. Curious to see how it works out.

Other things NOT deductible:
Union/Association dues
Uniform purchase and upkeep (no more dry-cleaning deductions)

Sort of off the subject....has anyone received their W2 via email yet? The version we had to sign up for before year end.

Thanks

No. Hopefully any day...

Cool, thanks.

LOL really.

I don't know where he works, but to get to a number like that he has to travel a lot obviously. I can't think of any airline/flight department that pays zero per diem/expenses of any kind that makes you travel that much (or any amount). So it isn't just 18K, its 18K above and beyond whatever per diem he gets in whatever form.

What seems like the most obvious answer is that he was pushing up against the limits of what's allowed (assuming all still technically legit) using every creative trick and interpretation imaginable. Good for him. Seriously. But part of the new law's purpose was to simplify things and roll back some of the asinine hoops people have to jump through while lowering the rates and brackets. Not to mention that many of the offsets in it could have been avoided had there been just a few percentage more votes to avoid the limits imposed on it by the reconcillation structural limitations but I digress.

I'd be in favor of a complete elimination of mortgage interest and especially all college expenses and 529 scams in exchange for another lowering of rates and brackets. But just like the flat tax in the 90's, even if you sit someone down and prove to them mathematically that they'll save more that way, they will squeal in refusal because they value their savvy deductions more than the money those deductions actually saved them.

Funny thing is its all irrelevant in the long run anyway. How much do we pay in debt interest, and what will that amount be in 10+ years regardless which party "runs" things? Assume closer to 30T, and calculate that on historicly reasonable interest rates of 5ish% and get back to us LOL.

There is absolutely no chance it will work out. Its not mathematically possible.

Rates will increase each year.

Not to mention trillion dollar annual deficits.

What did they increase to for 2019?

^^^^^This! I haven’t used that deduction in years for the same reason. Every dollar saved was immediately offset by AMT.


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Keep in mind if you live in a state with income tax you still wanted to input every writeoff as most states dont account for AMT. You may have increased any state taxes.

That’s something I hadn’t considered. I’ll look at that possibility when I do my 2018 state return.


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I go to a lot of places with very high per diem rates...not a regional...

Even if you went to places with $150/day m+e numbers, you’d have to do like 200+ overnights a year

Welcome to long haul freight... I flew that for years. Every year I laid over about 16 night a month, which is 192... add in some training or an extra trip. Not very hard to reach 200.

We have not run our final numbers yet, but in 2015 taxes on our earnings from short term gains in real estate were 51% (Fed, ACA on investments & State of GA) This year it is looking like 27%. We are paying half as much in taxes as we used to.

I have no idea if that is sustainable for our nation.

The problem (and is this political if I'm complaining about both sides of the partisan divide?) is the unfairness of the system.

During the Presidential debates Trump made the statement that if a guy was in real estate and was paying any taxes he "is dumb." Trump mostly (completely) avoids taxes by setting everything up in myriad accounts which cover his personal expenses as business expenses and receiving very little money personally. Most of us cannot set up shell companies that will fly us around in 757's, but, a self directed IRA is a decent way to isolate investment income and at least defer taxes on it. Hey, if your investments do well enough, your holding company needs a 757, right :-)

So far, Paul Ryan's tax plan (not really Trump's) seems more fair.

Sorry. To clarify: rates will go up each year from where they are now.

They did initially go down to offset the elimination of some major deductions.

Most of all the deductions everyone is claiming previous years were counting anyways with hitting alternative taxes. I ran sample returns this year and not only didn’t I owe as past years, it showed a return

It isn't, entitlements go broke in 2025, sooner, if there is a recession.



I'm seeing the same thing you are, my business got a 40% tax cut, but my income tax cut is nil: Just as the Chamber of Commerce wanted.

Until campaign finance reform happens, nothing else good for this nation can follow. The corporations write the laws, the lobbyists make sure their pet congressmen pass the corporate laws, and when this nation turns to poop the corporations and their managerial teams get the taxpayers to once again bail them out. The cycle won't end until we fix the way politicians get elected.

The 17th amendment is a major reason as well.

Any popular election will be bought from now on thanks to SCOTUS and their Citizens United v. FEC decision. Corporations and organizations are not people yet we give them the rights guaranteed to people and then treat them better than people. A revolution is coming but I have no idea when.

Money begets power begets money.

LOL right. You do realize what the C.U. case was all about right? Some want the gov to be able to control the discourse by controlling the finance, not to mention one side absolutely dominates in media, entertainment and academia as it is. (You want real campaign finance reform, cut off all aid including 529 scams to all colleges/incubators but I digress). And for what? 30 second ads mostly. So either you're worried that you will have your mind changed over 30 second ads, or you're worried all the other people's minds will be changed over 30 second ads. So we need gov to protect us by controlling the message. What could possibly go wrong.

You may want to do a little research on the actual decision. A large part of it involved not restricting free speech among organizations/associations, and that giving money to a campaign in democracy was a part of free speech. (This is where the whole "organizations are people too" thing came from). Sounds okay, but the problem is YOUR donations given to a candidate can't touch what a corporation like a large pharmaceutical company, or say, a large bank, can give. Money in politics = power over politians. That's why you have candidates with voting records in favor of shutting down congressional investigations into shady opiod distribution and over-eager lending. Follow the money. The only thing worse than the "swampy" money in politics is when someone appoints former leaders of said swampy companies for cabinet postions. But the people who fell for the "drain the swamp" BS stopped paying attention after election night.

The swamp more refers to the deeply ingrained Washington elite who run roughshod over the country through regulations and washing as much tax money through the bureaucracy in dc. Supposedly like a 1/3 of the traditional highly compensated executive branch appts have never been made yet the US survived.

What we need is strict term limits at every office to help deinfluence the lobbyist power to get people re-elected over and over and then a periodic top down justification of every position in govt wouldn’t hurt either. Business reevaluate positions all the time but govt NEVER gets smaller just finds ways to justify more people despite technology improvements and increased productivity in the civilian side of the world.

Also since CU case corps are restricted from giving more than a certain amount of money to a specific campaign, just like individuals but they can give to pac’s Unrestricted (just like individuals) to run adds for a specific cause.
Funny thing is that most corps now seem to be leaning towards the liberal side (Nike, Gillette, Starbucks etc ) so maybe next election cycle the Dems will once again embrace (instead of complain) free speech for the corps...... oh but wait they consider corps as generally evil, so there’s that.

No argument there. Look up sortition...there was a Ted talk a while back on it. Democracy by random selection, not unlike jury duty. It's a pretty interesting concept.

C.U. continues to be a persistant low information voter bumper sticker politics talking point. There is simply no way to "get money out of politics" without massive government control of politics. Not to mention that leftist candidates, causes and issues are benefitting mightily from unlimited funding from corporations and billionaires. We're seeing it more and more in fringe populist ballot initiatives and pop culture candidates like the skateboarding billionaire man of the people in TX and the pajama boy manchurian candidate in GA, almost all with record shattering out of state money that dwarfs anything from the so called right.

While I don't like that, there is simply no way to empower the government to stop it without striking a massive blow at freedom of expression that amounts to government censorship and control of the process. We simply can't give the government the power to cencor and outlaw a film that someone wants to freely watch simply because its "election season". That's insane.

Here's a short and very easy read on C.U. but be warned, its from a super alt-right fringe conservative source called the LA Times.


https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-e...226-story.html

Term limits ebb and flow in and out of the political discourse and once again its a topic that's trending. While I'm not adamantly against it, I really don't see it as very much of a solution.

Even if the same interests couldn't allocate funding and lobbying to re-elect someone, it could and still would do the exact same thing to elect someone else. And does anyone think a lifer like Ted Kennedy (one of the poster children for the concept; there's many others on all sides) would simply go away politically after a term or two? Nah, they'd just recycle into some other office or role or lobbyist while someone functionally identical gets elevated to the spotlight of power that corrupts just the same.

Its a discussion we should have, and I'm not against the concept, but we need to realize that if implemented, it will change surprisingly little.

The real solution would be to actually enforce the 9th and 10th amendments and limit federal power to specifically what is enumerated. Aviation falls squarely within that realm but a great deal of things currently done do not. Until and unless people on all sides of the political spectrum realize that, it won't matter how many years the same types of people stay in their respective offices.

Regardless of your politics, this decision distances representatives from their constituents as money for re-election trumps the input of individuals. More money in politics raises the threshold for the ear of the representative. Eventually city council members will be beholden to the national party and its PAC collective.

People making a movie critical of a politician isn't "money in politics" any more than the Oscars or The View or the vast majority of major network news/papers or most college campuses are 24/7/365. Should we censor all that during "election season"? And if so, for what? To shelter the impressionable masses so as to protect their predetermined political viewpoints, few if any of which are actually changed by media content in the first place?

C.U. was absolutely the right decision because its impossible to enforce a contrary policy without horrifying powers of governmental enforced speech controls.