Hello from Sagunto, Spain!

I am currently writing this while listening to the sounds of waves rolling in and eating paprika Lay’s. One hour ago, the girls and I were walking on the beach and collecting fairy rocks. This was all a perfect precursor for my true passion of talking to you all about small business taxes.

I wrote about doing my “side hustle” (such a humiliating phrase to describe a thing I do that makes no money) taxes for Morning Brew. Read that first, but I want to elaborate more for the nosy sickos.

At the end of last year, I started taking my theater/comedy shows more seriously because the movie-adapted plays that my friends and I do started to pop off financially. I was spending somewhere between two to three thousand dollars per show and making upwards of four and that amount of money felt scary to not be seriously tracking. I first found an amazing tax lady who is also an artist. We had an intro call and she said she got into taxes because all of her performance artist friends kept complaining about how their accountants wouldn’t let them write off 25 pounds of dried beans for a show. I was immediately like….Janet, you get it.

She helped me file for an LLC (more on that here) and file my 2024 taxes, which involved filling out a beefy, confusing document called a Schedule C. This document is how you report your business’s income and expenses, i.e. where you write everything off.

(Janet is hosting a workshop Wednesday, Feb 18th on how to fill out a Schedule C, I cannot recommend it enough. Even if you already did your taxes this year. Best $38 I ever spent.)

I group most of my expenses by project, but straight-up telling the IRS that I spent $11,255 on a stage adaptation of The Lizzie McGuire Movie wouldn’t work because…what are they going to do with that.

My budget-tracking sheet has two columns for descriptions:

For 2024, I wrote off ~$6,000 and had about $2,400 of income because I only tracked my expenses for two big shows and some December Ubers. I ended up getting a couple hundred dollars back after taxes. For my 2025 taxes, I am writing off (and don’t freak out) ~$32,000 worth of expenses. Here’s a dirty little breakdown of where that money went.

That big green chunk that represents a little over 33% (~$11,200) was the cost to put on our production of Lizzie McGuire this fall. I also pay $600 a month for a small art studio near my apartment (big blue chunk labled “Rent”). “Self Defense” represents the instructor pay, space rental, and equipment for a self defense class I organized last year (we hosted like 12 classes and broke even!). Another big category was “Camera Equipment” because Derek and I bought a fancy new camera to better film our shows. We also bought some new lights and other recording equipment for some video projects we worked on. It was a pretty expensive “Equipment/Furnishing” and supplies year because I bought stuff to furnish my studio and replenished a lot of supplies I needed like sewing stuff, paint rollers, and duct tape.

Girl, that’s a down payment!!! On a HOUSE. This amount of money is wild to see on a spreadsheet, but I had ~$18,000 in income this year through ticket sales, grants, etc. So that leaves about $15,000 that I “lost” on this business/hobby/side hustle/passion, which I know still seems insane but 1) it was over the course of a year and 2) most of it was stuff I paid for in the previous, but didn’t track, like:

I am a broken record, I know, but track their spending. If a majority of your time is spent performing or creating, you are probably putting way more of your money into it than you think. At least make a notes app to keep track of how many highlife’s you’re buying at Cafe Mustache! I know it’s scary to see just how much you spent on wigs or last minute props, but at least by documenting it you can write it off and get a FAT tax refund. I don’t know how much I’m getting back yet, but you better believe I’m going to be reinvesting it into our next show, or Brigid’s next short, or a dang coffee during a genius brainstorm session with my friends.

Next Issue: How I wrote this piece about DCOMs.

Thanks for reading and, as always, don’t tell me about any typos unless they are really bad.