Stop Overpaying Taxes: Smart Strategies to Save Thousands This Year

As a business owner, watching your hard-earned profits disappear to taxes can feel frustrating. It's not just disheartening—it's often confusing. But here's the good news: you may be paying more than you need to simply because no one's shown you the strategies to save.

At Make Taxes Fair, we specialize in helping business owners like you take back control. Using innovative, legal tax strategies, you can stop overpaying and put those savings to better use—like expanding your business, securing your family's future, or simply enjoying more of what you earn.

In this guide, we'll break down practical, actionable steps to optimize your tax savings during the year using our proven CLEAR EDGE Framework:

• Credit Optimization- Using tax credits to unlock massive savings
• Legal Structure- Choose the proper legal structure to help you optimize your taxes
• Employees- Finding, rewarding, and retaining employees using the tax code
• Accumulation of Wealth- Building real wealth in tax-optimized ways
• Retirement Planning- Capturing deductions now while maximizing your financial future
• Exit Planning- Cashing out without Uncle Sam becoming a significant equity owner
• Deduction Maximization- Claim every allowable expense to pay less in taxes
• Getting Organized- Protect yourself from audit by implementing a system 
• Efficiency is obtained for your taxes by implementing a system.

Ready to keep more of your money? Let's dive in.

What is Tax Optimization?

Tax optimization means leveraging the tax code to your advantage—legally. The U.S. tax system rewards specific actions, like hiring from diverse groups or investing in your business, with valuable incentives.

Instead of seeing taxes as drudgery or time suck, view the art of tax optimization as an opportunity to fuel your growth by keeping more of what you earn in your business. With a clear strategy, you're saving money and investing your time to make smarter investments in your business and future.

Unlock Tax Credits to Maximize Savings

What Are Tax Credits?
Tax credits are a goldmine for business owners. Unlike deductions that lower your taxable income, credits reduce your tax bill dollar for dollar. For example, a $5,000 tax credit means $5,000 less in taxes.

An example of a tax credit is the Workers Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC), one of the most potent credits for building your business by scaling and hiring. Designed to encourage companies to hire individuals from specific groups (like veterans or long-term unemployed), WOTC can deliver between $1,200 and $9,600 per eligible employee.

How to Claim WOTC:

1. Implement a pre-screening process and complete IRS Form 8850 before hiring.
2. Submit the form to your State Workforce Agency within 28 days of the employee's start date.

📝 Pro Tip: Add WOTC screening to your hiring SOPs to ensure you capture this credit for every qualified employee. Missing this step? That's thousands left on the table.

Check out our FREE Tax Strategy Resource Center resource at maketaxesfair.com/resource-center for this and other strategies.

Maximize Business Travel Deductions

Traveling for business? Your trips can become valuable tax deductions—if you follow the rules.

Qualifying Travel Expenses include:

• Airfare and transportation
• Hotel accommodations
• 50% of meal costs
• Business-related mileage

The Golden Rule states that the trip's primary purpose must be business-related, such as attending industry conferences, meeting clients, or planning retreats.

Layover Days: The Hidden Gem

Did you know weekend layover days between business events can be fully deductible? For example, if your conference ends Friday and you plan for your next business meeting to be at the location or vicinity of the conference on the Monday following the conference, your weekend lodging and meals may qualify as business expenses.

📝 Pro Tip: Keep an itinerary of all business activities, save receipts, and use credit cards to simplify expense tracking.

Check out our FREE Tax Strategy Resource Center resource at www.MakeTaxesFair.com for this and other strategies.

The Augusta Rule: Earn Tax-Free Rental Income

What if you could earn up to $28,000 in tax-free income while reducing your business taxes? Enter the Augusta Rule.

Here's how it works: You can rent your home for up to 14 days per year, and the rent you collect from your business is excluded from taxable income. Meanwhile, your business can deduct the rental cost as a business expense.

To capture this little gem, which has become more popular due to social media, you have to do certain things to ensure that your deduction is audit-proof.

How to Make It Audit-Proof

1. Document the event's business purpose and agenda.
2. Collect quotes from local venues to establish a fair market rental value.
3. Issue an invoice from your business to yourself and document the payment.

That second step is the magic ingredient where most business owners fail miserably at this strategy! You must collect quotes from local venues to establish the fair market value of the rents that you charge to your business.

We have an entire training on this powerful strategy that you can check out as a FREE resource in our Tax Strategy Resource Center at www.MakeTaxesFair.com. Check out this and other methods, and STOP WASTING MONEY ON TAXES!

Invest in ADA Compliance and Earn Tax Credits

Improving accessibility isn't just good for your customers—it's great for your taxes. The Disabled Access Tax Credit gives you a tax credit (up to $5,000 annually) for small businesses that try to ensure that their physical and/or virtual spaces are accessible under the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) rules.

Qualifying Improvements:

Examples of improvements and maintenance of ADA expenses can include:

• Installing wheelchair ramps
• Adding closed captions to videos
• Updating websites to meet accessibility standards

Beyond the Savings: ADA compliance enhances your reputation, expands your customer base, and protects you from lawsuits—all while putting money back in your pocket.

Once again, you should check out our training and resources for this specific strategy that we have put together, which are available in our Resource Center at MakeTaxesFair.com.

Pulling It All Together: Your Action Plan

Tax savings don't happen by accident—they happen when you take action. 

We encourage you as a business owner to act with FIRE!

Focus: Block out distractions and focus on a tax strategy.

Impact: Understand the impact. I.E. How much money will this strategy save you?

React: Actually, you should OVERREACT and start taking action steps.

Efficiency: Do these steps and execute them to obtain efficiency?

Whether leveraging WOTC, optimizing travel deductions, or tapping into the Augusta Rule, every strategy you apply FIRE to will help you keep more of what you earn.

The trick is that you have to do the work and execute the strategy! There is no substitute for taking action, which is why we like the FIRE method: to focus on what matters most by understanding how that impacts you! 

Let's Make Taxes Fair

At Make Taxes Fair, we specialize in helping business owners like you develop custom tax strategies that work. Don't let another year go by leaving money on the table.

Ready to take back control?

👉 Visit MakeTaxesFair.com to start your custom tax strategy and make this your most profitable year yet by claiming your taxes back from the government and keeping those dollars where they belong… in your bank account and at work, business, and home.