Like anime figures?
Hate taxes?
Let’s kill two birds with one stone.
First, let’s establish some terms. A “business expense” is a tax term, used to describe costs associated with doing business. A staggering amount of things are eligible as business expenses, from inventory and equipment purchases to consulting fees and advertising costs. Even half the bill at a restaurant can be written off as a business expense if business is discussed during the meal.
The advantage of business expenses is that they’re deducted from taxable income. Think about it: If you make money, but reinvest it into your business, that’s not really income. This, by the way, is how Amazon paid zero in federal income tax in 2018.
So all we need to do is figure out how to make anime figures into a business expense. There are multiple ways to do this. You could do like I did and start a business selling them which, if you’re making a genuine effort, allows you not only to write off your anime figure purchases, but also gives you the opportunity to buy them at distributor prices, which are significantly cheaper than retail.
However, if you just want to not pay taxes on your anime figure money and don’t want to be bothered with setting up an infrastructure, go the media route. Start a YouTube channel, Instagram page, WordPress blog (or all three), around anime figure culture. Enable monetization on your YouTube channel, slap some J-List Affiliate links on your WordPress blog, and congratulations: You can justify your $250 ¼ scale Cecilia Alcott FREEing bunnygirl figure with the real fishnet stockings as part of your cost of doing business.
If you buy a lot of figures per year, you could easily shave a thousand or more dollars off of your taxable income.
I should emphasize that I’m not a tax professional and that this is mostly a joke, but based on what I know about business taxes and writeoffs, it’s entirely justifiable to write off purchases like anime figures if they’re used for business pursuits.
For example: I take lots of photos and videos of my own figures for this blog, Iyashikei, and other brands under the She’s Lost Control Media umbrella. Now, most of them were either purchased before I was in business, or were bought from my distributor through my figure retailer and are already business expenses, but if they weren’t, I could justify expensing some or all of the cost to buy them.
For another example: I did some consulting work for a friend of mine looking to grow his YouTube/Twitch brand into a viable business, and part of the advice I gave him was that he could justifiably write off things like his camera equipment and game purchases.
It’s a different way to think about taxes. Rather than, as an employee, your taxes being deducted automatically with you taking what’s left, as a business owner, you’re free to use your income to take care of your expenses pre-tax, with the expectation that whatever’s left is income you’ll pay taxes on.
Just another way looking at things with a business sense saves you money.