Taxes will hurt next year?

Save all of your receipts anyway man and give them to a professional at the end of the year. You'll never know. And saving all of your receipts will probably only amount to an additional hour or two of work. Its your money. Keep track of it.

 

What do the two, per diem & the standard deduction, have to do with each other? Per diem is gone as a deduction option now for an employee.

 

Until this year, I’ve not been a fan of company paying a portion of your pay as per diem. Now, under the new tax plan, it’s to a company driver’s advantage to be paid that way.

 

No it isn't.
Your income will look lower,
you'll get less workers comp if you get hurt
you're Social Security benefits will be lower
you'll qualify for a lower mortgage amount,
And @TommyTrucker88 there's a lot of threads about this already

 

You will qualify for a lower mortgage amount even if you itemize at end of the year.

 

Who cares on the mortgage? Anyone who buys anywhere near what they can qualify for is nuts and will be house poor. They won’t own the house it will own them. We are on our third house and we have never bought one over half of what we qualified for.

 

We paid our home off in 6 years on two or three acres of land. The money sunk into the home turned out to be about three times what it sold for in 2013. On the other hand, it's easy to hold onto property when your revenuer only required about 220 a year on everything. Compared to say Maryland where the taxes approach 10,000 and beyond annually on that property.

We could count that as a loss. But no. It was paid for and we were in it a good long time.

Our withholding each week were strictly designed to erase whatever taxes at the end of the year. When we stopped OTR trucking, we reduced our annual joint gross income to less than 23k then to less than 18K to stay break even with no tax due or returned. Being debt free in those days allowed us to do well without trying to keep up with the joneses.

We don't pay taxes now, but it's does not matter anymore we do a little bit of work to bring in some extra but it will not trigger a taxable amount in either state or federal next Feb. It really matters not anymore.

We did use Per Diem back in 2001 the last year for OTR work at a flat deduction of something like 13700 total for 306 service days. We disposed of the retained logs for that work year 8 years later. That's for a team of two people.

Now that per deim is gone, don't bother with it. Your standard deduction is doubled as a company driver. But in the end taxes will go up and bite harder. Save everything in reciepts and hand it all in a box to your tax professional.

Your future SS will be determined by your wages or gross you make now. The more you make the better off you will be. The last years of 1998 to 2001 was the most important time of my life as far as SS was concerned.

The trucking industry will experience a net loss of drivers as time goes by replaced by immigrants unaware that we have been paying .32 a mile for the last 40 or so plus years. To them that low piddly wage will be untold riches.

 

I was told the same thing when I filed my taxes this month. The blanket deduction for every day being away from home will disappear for company drivers for 2018 tax year filings and only be available to O/O or L/P drivers. Was never a fan of taking per diem if a company offered it but I am already retired from two successful careers and don't need to fret over my reportable wages being lower due to non-taxable per diem.

 

They have a lot to do with one another, especially now. But now, taking the company per diem plan (if offered) makes at least some sense now that employee business expense deduction is gone. This is about the only way [now] for a company driver to reduce their tax burden. But I still refuse to play their per diem game [as it's usually structured at most places], just on principle

For the true OTR guys who stay out in excess of 320 days/yr, the new tax law is actually a penalty comparing the old system to the new system. It just sucks they do a job nobody wants to do and everybody else sees a tax benefit, yet OTR guys see a tax liability.

Pitch a fit to your congressman and senator. It's hard enough keeping experienced drivers in this job as it is, let alone stripping them of the one positive factor they used to could count on.