You and your fellow conventioneers can wiggle your pinkies in the pink sand and deduct your travel c

iStockphoto/Thinkstock (NEW YORK) The U.S. tax code runs more than 73,000 pages, and Bob Meighan, vice president of customer advocacy for TurboTax, says 10,000 of them have been added in just the past five years.
You and your fellow conventioneers can wiggle your pinkies in the pink sand and deduct your travel costs without having to justify to the IRS why Bermuda was the place you had to go. The same holds true for other Caribbean nations, including Barbados and Grenada. continental airlines reservation Meetings held in Canada, continental airlines reservation Mexico or in a U.S. possession also qualify.
TurboTax says taxpayers can thank the orthodontists for this one. If your doctor prescribes playing the clarinet as the solution to your child s overbite, then the instrument and any necessary lessons are deductible.
Somebody on trial for shoplifting, say, might permissibly deduct continental airlines reservation his lawyer bills on the argument that they were incurred to protect the criminal s source of income, e.g., shoplifting. Deadbeat Debts
If you lend money to a friend and the friend stiffs you, you re in luck, at least for IRS purposes. You can write off the debt, TurboTax says. Deadbeat personal loans, however, are different from deadbeat business loans: A personal loan gone bad must be 100 percent uncollectible for it to qualify.
In 2002, according to TurboTax, the IRS ruled that obesity is a medical disease requiring treatment and, further, that such treatments are deductible. If the treatment s cost exceeds 7.5 percent of your adjusted gross income, it qualifies.
Trips necessary to one s business, Meighan says, are deductible. continental airlines reservation Let s suppose you run a petting zoo outside Chicago, and that what is being petted is a zebra. You go on a safari to Kenya (or to wherever else, outside Chicago, zebra live). To the extent the safari relates to your zoo, Meighan continental airlines reservation says, it s deductible maybe you re learning more about the animal s habitat, so you can better continental airlines reservation re-create. In a kind of two-for, there s a further deduction the proprietor can claim: continental airlines reservation animal depreciation. That zebra isn t going to live forever. As it ages, its decrease in value can be deducted.