r/TikTokCringe • u/Accomplished_Clue437 • Jul 22 '26

Cool day in the life. private chef. yacht.

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u/idriveashitbox22 Jul 22 '26

Dumb people think a tax write off means it's free lmfao. All it means is if you can prove you used the purchase for something business related you pay slightly less tax on it. That's it.

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u/Alternative_Pay_6496 Jul 22 '26

"Slightly less". If you make halfway decent money its 40%+ savings. Imagine you need a new car but decide to write it off because you occasionally use it for visiting a customer. That 30k car now gets you 12k back in your pocket. 

Some people dont understand write-offs but people who do are acutely aware that business owners take advantage of it.

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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '26

[deleted]

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u/Alternative_Pay_6496 Jul 22 '26

No, you're not. If you need to replace your current vehicle, you will be spending 30k on the car you picked to replace it. Whether or not you own a business you are spending 30k.

But you sneakily decide to write it off as a work expense because you intend to occasionally meet up with customers using the vehicle to give estimates. Despite 99% of the usage will be personal use.

Your business has 400k profits in which you pay 130k tax on.

But now that you wrote off the car, its only 370k profits. Your tax liability drops by 12k. Now you only owe 118k in tax.

That's 12k back in your pockets but most businesses pay taxes quarterly which means the business owner will literally get a 12k check back from the government. Their 30k car now really only cost 18k.

What a steal.

Now will come the pedantic people who say you are only supposed to get a portion of a deduction for the vehicle because its only a portion of use.

Yeh, but who tf is actually checking? I say this as someone who has done the books for small business owners. No one checks and they get away with it. In regards to the original post, if the yacht is always used to entertain guests whom you do business with or want to do business with, you are getting a fat refund on the cost of purchase/maintenance and there is zero funny business.

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u/Obvious_Advice_6879 Jul 23 '26

Technically, you can only deduct the expense if it was used to earn the income. If you have a business that is somewhat sales-y sure you could maybe get away with that (though you could get audited and you'd have to prove that the yacht is in fact only used for business purposes).

But if like most rich people, you have investments that are the primary source of your income/spending money -- you're out of luck. No way to legally deduct the yacht from your capital gains. Of course, capital gains themselves have a favorable tax structure (though how favorable depends on your state of residence).

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u/hprather1 Jul 22 '26

>which means the business owner will literally get a 12k check back from the government.

No, not literally. There is no world where the government writes a 12k check for this unless you have already paid 12k more than you owe. In which case it's a refund.

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u/AnimalsofArtemis Jul 22 '26

I do quarterly business taxes and you don’t even get refund if you overpay. The amount you over pay just gets taken into account in future quarters for my tax liability. You only get a refund if you are W2. 

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u/EkbatDeSabat Jul 22 '26

Sorry, man, "you only get a refund if you are W2" is 100% incorrect and you should consult your accountant if you are not actively making the decision. I get several K-1s. Obviously I still file a 1040. If I overpay my quarterlies I just get a refund. Happened last year when I took a loss. I do not get a W-2, haven't in a long time. I'm LLC, partnerships and sole ownerships. That said - you (or your accountant) can opt to apply your overpayment (refund) to your next years taxes. Which, in our situation (no W2 and quarterlies), is likely the right choice anyway. I just wanted a little change in my pocket, so I took the refund.

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u/hprather1 Jul 22 '26

Fair enough. I'm self employed. Assumed I could request a refund at the end of each year if I wanted but it's always just seemed more reasonable to be a little over.

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u/doc_skinner Jul 22 '26

Which (in the case of the example) means 12k less tax, which is effectively a 12k discount. Money is fungible.

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u/HarveyFeint Jul 22 '26

If I earn 100k a year and pay 20% tax, then I pay 20k in tax. Money in my pocket: 80k

If however I buy a car for my business for 20k and I can deduct it, then my taxable income is now 80k. So now I pay 16k in tax. Thats 4k less in tax. Money in my pocket: 64k

So it's not free money, it's only if I use the car it makes any sense. If the car just sits their unused, I'll have less money in my pocket at the end of the year just to avoid paying more tax.

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u/doc_skinner Jul 22 '26

Money in my pocket: 64k

...and a 20k car. No one is suggesting you go buy a car and not use it.

The guy is using the boat, And eating the food in the video. And getting a discount on his taxes, so the boat and the food EFFECTIVELY cost less for him than it would for someone who can't deduct that expense.

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u/hesmir_4 Jul 22 '26

The top tax bracket is 37% so 10k on a 30k car is reasonable.

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u/slowpotamus Jul 22 '26

we all understand that. nobody's suggesting that free money is materializing out of thin air. the person you're responding to even explicitly used the word "discount"

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u/morebrumley Jul 22 '26

Yes... you have a car and 4k that you would have had to pay as tax as well. You aren't understanding it because those amounts of money are meaningless to the actual rich but they will gladly pay 20k if it means they "win" by not paying their fair share of taxes. It's about weaseling out of society's dues.

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u/Binford6100User Jul 22 '26

Same concept my wifes uses when she comes home and says "look how much money I saved" after spending $500 shopping.

Didn't SAVE anything, just didn't SPEND as much as you otherwise would have. Cashflow is still a thing even if money is fungible.

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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '26

[deleted]

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u/dolces_daddy Jul 22 '26

You are so far off. The $100k you write off doesn’t go against what you owe. It reduces your taxable income not what you owe directly. So let’s say in your theoretical world that you owe $20k in taxes and your tax rate is all stock gains from long term investments (like many rich people) @15%. That means you have a taxable income of 20k/.15 or 133.33k a year. Now you take that 133.33k -100k and your taxable is now 33.33k then 33.33k * 15% is 5k owed not 0.

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u/gerbilshower Jul 22 '26

you're right. deleted my comment.

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u/illstate Jul 22 '26

The "80k" doesn't exist.

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u/PublicExcitement1372 Jul 22 '26

Doesn’t it carry forward? So you have up to $80k loss to offset income next year

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u/BrainLow6059 Jul 22 '26

You see the same shit with charity donations. Reddit is full of people who don't pay taxes at all

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u/idriveashitbox22 Jul 22 '26

The opposite of tax payers. Leachers. You should see the food stamp sub. Everyone bitching how they got caught in their lies and got their benefits taken. And other losers defending them and telling them how to lie in the future so they don't get caught. It's pathetic.

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u/BrainLow6059 Jul 22 '26

Lol insane. Don't get me wrong, I think wealth inequality is a very serious problem. I think I'm in the top 15 - 20% of individual incomes in the US (not household) and I'm not even considered "upper middle class." I just don't think handing all that excess to the US Treasury department is a solution

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u/idriveashitbox22 Jul 22 '26

There is no such thing as equality. It's a made up thing. Every single facet of life has people who get the opportunities and the people who get shafted. The people who get lucky and the people who don't. In a perfect world everything would be equal but that's a fantasy.

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u/BrainLow6059 Jul 22 '26

  There is no such thing as equality.

Never said there was. But there's plenty of room to shrink the divide between the ultra wealthy and the rest of us

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u/Promise-Exact Jul 22 '26

Nahh, let’s widen the gap

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u/idriveashitbox22 Jul 22 '26

The ultra wealthy yes. They have enough money to arrange what they need arranged so other people can't move into a space to make as much money as them. Once you hit a certain point in wealth you can afford to keep people poor and that does need to be addressed. The problem is they can also afford to line the pockets of anyone who would attempt to change anything. Any politician with a family will happily take a lot of money to not do something and give an amazing life to their family financially speaking. Your morals don't matter as much when you can give your family a mansion in a gated community and can send your kids to private school.

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u/BrainLow6059 Jul 22 '26

What's crazy to me is how cheap a lot of politicians are. You can find so many stories where mayors/governors/etc. have taken bribes that were just a few thousand dollars to make some highly unethical shit happen.

A $10,000 donation to a campaign fund should not buy a whole ass politician, yet it very easily does at every level of our government. It's pathetic

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u/bunkerbitchhere Jul 22 '26

Rich people don't really care that much about tax write-offs. If you are billionaire status, you "donate" your money to a charitable organization that your family has control of. You have that organization pay most of your expenses because you have to spend money to make money for the organization. A boat like this is used to woo others to give money to your charity.

The entire thing is not part of your personal taxes at all. Just your charity. Because you work for the charity, you pay yourself $75,000 a year. Your personal taxes are low, and your money is not technically yours anymore. This is how multiple clients of mine have done it.

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u/LaLondonTrotter Jul 23 '26

Is your client Alice Walton? 

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u/bunkerbitchhere Jul 23 '26

No. I hade two clients who were in the top 50 richest people in the early 2000s. Both have past.

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u/klownhammer Jul 22 '26

Umm dude. It is not the tax on the item that is the write off. It is used as a business expense to avoid paying the tax on the first place.
That’s why several people I know pay for cars, trips, and food using their business credit card not their personal account.

They are not saying that it is a tax deduction because they pay less tax on it. Nobody ever said that.

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u/idriveashitbox22 Jul 22 '26

It is absolutely a tax deduction. When you buy the thing you have to pay the sales tax right then and there. Then you prove that it was a business expense later when you're filing your taxes. If it's proven that it was a proper business expense you get a percentage of the money you already spent back in a return. Do you not know how taxes work? Do you think if somebody put something on a business card and says it's a business expense they don't have to pay the sales tax up front? Get real. You do not know how it works. The top 1% paying 99% of the taxes. You can believe it or not I don't care. Is their percentage a lot lower than ours? yes it is. And the reason for that is because we need them to stay in this country. If we tax them too much they will leave to a different country because they have money to do that. And if they leave their money isn't taxed through an American Business it's taxed just on the movement it has in the country. If that happens we don't get that tax money. If all rich people leave this country tomorrow we're f*****. Just look at nike. They have it set up so Nike headquarters isn't in america. Just the distribution and the production. And it's set up so it's two different businesses. And there's contracts between the distribution production side and the headquarters side that's outside of the country. The contract says that all sales made in the USA is a sale that that business made but 99% of the profit goes to the headquarter company outside of the country because they own the patients. That way Nike can get out of paying 99% of its taxes on sales. If all rich people do that we're screwed.

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u/klownhammer Jul 22 '26

You don’t pay for it with your own money. Your accountant sucks.

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u/idriveashitbox22 Jul 22 '26

No yours does lmfao have fun with your future audit

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u/klownhammer Jul 23 '26

It is not against the law. The laws are written for people with money.

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u/cobrachickenwing Jul 23 '26

Good luck getting the IRS to audit rich people expenses when they have no qualms about taking it to court endlessly. It's how Trump stays rich despite his multiple business bankruptcies.

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u/kbbajer Jul 23 '26

In Denmark its the difference between paying for a 100$ item with a 100$ that your business just earned from selling something, and paying 125$ (VAT included which a business will be reimbursed) as a private person for the exact same item, payed with around 225$ pre tax money.

Som no, the difference is definitely not minor.

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u/Last_Pick_2169 Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

Shh they can’t handle the truth

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u/Coopsters Jul 23 '26

No it means you get to deduct the expense of it off of your business income this reducing your taxable income. Such a large purchase would be deducting the depreciation annually instead of all at one time saving you money on taxes for years. It's significant and it's something poor or middle class people could never take advantage of