Per Diem is Great...

I believe its still 80% of 52.00 or 41.60/day no receipts. Receipts for 41.60 to 52.00.

 

Line 9 Instructions for form 2106 states that employees subject to DOT HOS are allowed 80% of the standard per-diem for each day they are subject to the DOT HOS. Receipts are not required for M&IE and entertainment if you use the standard per-diem deduction. All you need to be able to prove is that you were subject to DOT HOS regs on those days. There is a paragraph that deals specifically with those days which you started or ended at your primary domicile that disallows using the standard per-diem rate on those days, and goes on to define primary domicile as your home terminal.

Furthermore, the rule only applies to Interstate Truck Drivers, not intrastate.

However, like most tax questions, better to ask your tax professional

 

this past year my acct. fig. my return w/out incl. per diem i was too pay 600.
after he fig. it in i received a return of 1000. it does help.

 

Our Company doesn't even give us the option, once you reach 33cpm... Per Diem is automatic, no questions asked, no opt out form, you take it or you drive for someone else. I guess its good news then that I wont be up to 33cpm until August of 2010..... LMFAO. Im a glutton for punishment

 

I look at it like this: If you're under 30...take per diem. Why pay into a system that is going to eventually fail you anyways? At minimum, you can invest some of that per diem money on your own terms (IRAs, CDs, etc.) and actually see a return on it one day.

 

Not all companies operate this way.

The company I worked for handed me their credit card for my daily per diem. $100 a day for hotel, food, and truck related expense. Not one single dollar of that money was ever tied to me at tax time. My company ate it lock stock and barrel.

 

Before I got my CDL back in '94 I had a great part-time OTR job driving a 6-wheeler flatbed for a (now out of biz, I think) electroplating company called The Welin Company down in Tucson. Each week they'd have me take a bunch of huge hydraulic mining equipment rods on a trip up to Salt Lake City and back. Felt like winning the lottery when I got the job - it was advertised in the Tucson paper and they got hundreds of applicants. (Timing is everything: I was the last guy to walk through the door, and they weren't about to go through all those other applications!)

I seem to recall them giving me a credit card to use on those trips, for gas and lodging (had to buy my own food though).

Those were the days. Seems pretty unlikely my current employer - a public company on the NASDAQ stock exchange - would give me one of their cards to use! (Actually, I do at least have a fuel card.)

 

Definitely the right approach if you ask me.

Forget about SS, let's talk about the U.S. Treasury. On the one hand it seems unimaginable that U.S. Treasury bonds could ever become a risky investment, but on the other, if you look at the national debt and wonder what that really, truly means for the future of the U.S. economy, it becomes kind of hard to imagine U.S. Treasury bonds being worth much if anything at all in the not-too-distant future.

The crack addict/degenerate gambler analogy is spot on.

 

I'm skeptical about this. For awhile all I had was a postal mailbox in a casino down in Laughlin, NV. I still claimed the standard meal deduction for each day I was on the road. Who's to say that I didn't live in that casino? Some people live in hotels. The daily room rates there are comparable to what you'd pay to rent an apartment. Sometimes I actually DID stay in that casino, too.

I guess you'd have to save all the hotel receipts to show the IRS if they ever audited you.

Thankfully I bought a condo there a year or two later, so the issue is now moot to me.

 

Doesn't this contradict itself? If you claim the rest, how is it still under the standard deduction? My impression of company per diem is that you get your $52/day one way or another, it's just that they dock your pay.

I think I get your point, which is all that really matters.