Camming

Kevin Bachhuber is a financial professional licensed to sell insurance and securities products in the state of Wisconsin.

Note: I am not a licensed tax professional, so my suggestions should be taken as suggestions. Talk to a CPA or other tax professional for your specific situation.

Second Warning: I try to make this as interesting as possible. Unfortunately, it is difficult to make any conversation about tax deductions anything but dry. I apologize in advance.

So, when talking about taxes, the key idea is maximizing your tax deductions. There’s a fairly large set of IRS caselaw relating to strippers and how they can qualify their expenses for tax deduction. It’s an expensive business; why add a giant tax bill if you don’t have to?

Tax Tip 1: Talk to a CPA. Most of the rest of this article should be considered with the help of a Certified Public Accountant. They’ll be able to help figure out what applies to you, what doesn’t, how/when to pay your taxes, and more.

Tax Tip 2: Incorporate! Corporations are people, so why not be a corporation? Most dancers and camgirls are independent contractors, so they can readily take advantage of incorporating into a sole proprietorship business. There are a number of advantages: business expenses (more on that later) may be tax deductible through the business, you can pay taxes quarterly, and you can provide yourself employee benefits.

Providing employee benefits (to yourself) can lower your tax bill significantly. The IRS has set up specific types of retirement accounts called Solo 401(k) plans that allow you to put up to $50,000 per year towards retirement. Depending on how you set up this account, that whole amount may be tax-deferred (meaning you don’t pay taxes until you withdraw the money during retirement). Additionally, you may be able to deduct the cost of premiums for any health insurance or disability insurance you provide for yourself.

You can register your business and get an Employee Identification Number here. Whether you incorporate into a sole proprietorship, LLC, S Corporation, or C Corporation will depend on your individual needs, and the incorporation process will depend on your state.

Tax Tip 3: Know what you can and cannot deduct. It’s incredibly expensive to be a stripper or a camgirl. You can use these business expenses to lower your taxable income. The most common tax deductions a stripper or camgirl may be able to claim include:

• Work clothes. The IRS defines work clothes as something you purchase specifically for your job that you cannot wear outside of work. Most of your outfits, costumes, and shoes probably qualify. Hair, makeup, and nails are a little more questionable due to a set of archaic IRS definitions.

• Travel and lodging: If you travel between clubs, or as part of a national circuit, you may be able to deduct the mileage and any hotel stays from your taxes. The IRS specifies that it has to be traveling from place of work to place of work, not from your home to your place of work.

• Computer and webcams: If you’re a camgirl, your computer and webcam are considered business expenses.

• Breast implants/augmentation: This one can be a little tricky. Chesty Love was the first stripper who successfully argued that her breast implants were business expenses. She was also able to show that her income quadrupled, the breasts were too big for personal use, and she would be removing them when she retired from stripping. If you can show a significant increase in income after the procedure, it may be deductible for you. (Source)

• Housing: If you run a business from your home, and you have a specified area of it you use for work, you may be able to claim a percentage of your rent/mortgage and utilities as business expenses. It’s neat; a CPA can tell you more.

• Club fees, cam fees, and other expenses: This is one of the hardest sets of deductions for most dancers to pull off, but it can be worth your while. Between entrance fees, paying the barstaff, cuts taken from lap dances, and other fees imposed by the club, many strippers will pay about ⅓ of their earnings right back to the strip club. Likewise, everybody takes a cut in the webcamming process. If you can keep records of how much you pay to the club or website, you may be able to deduct those fees.

Tax Tip 4: Keep the best records you can. I know most strip club owners are not exactly willing to provide you with records of when you’ve worked or how much you pay in club fees. Keep records of the days you worked, how much you paid in different types of fees, and how much you made. It’ll not only help you with your taxes, it’ll give you an idea of what your business cashflow is like, and data to support or disprove your assumptions. Strip and Grow Rich offers a really great inexpensive notebook you can purchase to help you keep track of this – here’s a link to purchase it.

Tax Tip 5: Donate to charity. And get receipts. Donations to charity are an awesome tax deduction. You get to help the larger community and reduce your tax bill at the same time. I’ll give a shout-out for the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom. They do a LOT of work for the benefit of the fetish, kink, and otherwise sexually awesome communities.

One more note on charitable donations: I’d recommend checking the charities you donate to with Charity Watch first. Make sure your money is being used to help people or causes, rather than paying too much to the leaders of the charity. Check out http://www.charitywatch.org/toprated.html.

Rebecca Avalon of Strip and Grow Rich also did a video on how to file taxes. You can check it out on her website.

Kevin Bachhuber is a fetishist and a financial services professional in Madison, Wisconsin. You can follow him on Twitter, LinkedIn, and find his business website here. Kevin can help you with financial planning and retirement services, like estate planning, life insurance, annuities, charitable giving, business insurance, executive compensation, and employee benefits.