September 24, 2025 • 32 mins
Escape the ordinary and learn how to turn your business trips into tax-saving opportunities! Join Rondi Lambeth poolside in Cancun as he shares his insider secrets for legally and ethically writing off business travel. Discover how to document your expenses, involve your family, and navigate the complexities of IRS regulations.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
76% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and according to
Forbes, 93% of business owners pay more than legally required
to pay an income tax. And nearly 50% of all Americans
have bad credit, but not you, atleast not anymore.
See, this is the school of wealth where you learn how to
(00:21):
maximize your credit, minimize your taxes and multiply your
assets so you can create generational wealth.
Hi, I'm Randy Lambert, certifiedFICO credit professional,
author, speaker and tax strategist.
For the last 20 years, I've helped 10s of thousands of
Americans just like you take control of their money, fix
(00:42):
their credit, wipe out their debt, cut their taxes by 50% and
multiply their assets. If you're ready to break free
from the rat race and start building a life of freedom and
abundance, then you're in the right place.
Welcome to the School of Wealth.I want to welcome to another
(01:03):
episode of the School of Wealth.I'm your host, Rodney Lambeth.
And if you're watching this video, you see that I am not in
my normal studio. And if you're listening to this,
you will notice that the audio quality is probably not what you
expected. And that is because I am in
Cancun, Mexico, in the pool at the resort with the ocean behind
me. So I thought what better placed
(01:27):
than the pool to do a podcast and update and why don't I do
it? On the topic of writing off
business travel, See, earlier today I had a young lady asked
me what I did. And I was, I'm here with a group
of 42 different business owners at a speaker Academy.
(01:49):
And we are all learning how to get better at public speaking.
And even though I've done a lot of public speaking over the last
20 years of my financial career as a credit expert and tax
strategist, you can always get better.
And so she asked me, like, what is it you do?
And so I told her I said, you know, I help people with their
money and their credit, maximizing their credit,
(02:09):
minimizing their debt and taxes and multiplying their assets.
And she asked a few more questions as those conversations
tend to go and taxes came up. And I said, yeah, you know, like
I teach people how to to travel the world and essentially get
the IRS to pay for it. Now, the IRS obviously does not
send you a check to pay for it. It's just another way of saying
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to write it off. So today on this very special
episode, as I sip on tequila andsoda, I thought I would spend a
little bit of time just going over how to legally ethically
reduce your income taxes and howto legally and ethically write
(02:55):
off business travel. Now I have a rule when it comes
to any of my tax strategies and write offs and that is the
triple D rule and that is need to be able to document it so you
can defend it when you deduct it.
So that is the triple D rule document, defend, deduct.
(03:18):
So in order to write off business travel, whether it's
for you, your spouse, your children, what you actually need
to do and what actually what qualifies as business travel.
Now under IRS Code 162 A, it says that anything that's
ordinary and necessary for the business essentially to make
(03:41):
money to stay in business can bea tax write off.
So remember that anything that'sordinary and necessary.
So is it ordinary and necessary to travel as a business owner?
Well, it depends on your business.
You know, if you are a plumber and you primarily get all of
(04:04):
your business in the area that you live, then it might not be
ordinary and necessary as a plumber to travel to Cancun like
where I'm at right now. However, if there was a plumbing
convention where you could go and spend time with other
(04:25):
plumbers, marketing agents, AI specialist, tax strategist,
etcetera, and you can learn how to take your plumbing business
to the next level, well then that would be ordinary and
necessary. But how do you bring your spouse
with you? Well, your spouse would need to
be part of the business if you were going to deduct their
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portion of the trip. Now, if you're not going to
deduct your your spouse's portion of the trip, then hey,
look, then they don't have to bepart of the company.
But if you want to maximize the tax code so you can maximize the
deductions, so you can maximize the savings, then one of the
strategies is to have your spouse be part of the business.
(05:10):
Now I have found with working with thousands of business
owners over the last 20, now 20 plus years, that generally if
your spouse is involved in your business, your business going to
do better than if your spouse isnot part of your business.
And that's because if you're working on it together, then you
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understand the problems with it together and you're spending
time together and it's, you know, 2 is stronger than one
where if, whereas the, the clients that I have that only
one of the spouses is doing the business and the other has their
own job, there's struggles there.
So I always recommend to my clients that both parties, both
people in the relationship, if you're married, work on the
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business. It just makes it stronger
because what you might be strongin your spouse might not be, you
know, and financially there's always generally there's a
spender in the relationship and there's a saver in the
relationship. You know, opposites attract.
So if you do have a spouse and you wanted to bring your spouse
with you to do the travel, they would need to be part of the
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business, whether it's the bookkeeper, the CFO, the
marketing agent, HR, etcetera. They don't have to necessarily
be a full time employees, so it's not like they they can't
have another job, but they have to be actively engaged in the
business in order for you to write off their portion of the
business travel. Now what about the kids?
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Children, you know, when I, whenmy kids were younger, they would
travel anywhere I went. They, I would take them with,
with me. And one of the things they did
differently than most parents isI didn't really care about
whether they missed school or not.
If, you know, obviously if they had a big game coming up or a
test. But if it was just another
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ordinary day at school or another ordinary week and I had
a business trip in Cozumel or Hawaii or Florida or Colorado, I
would take my kids out of schooland take them with me.
Because I felt that travel was as important, if not more
important than sitting in schoolall day.
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Because they could just easily make it up the following week.
And a lot of times they'd get their homework up front and they
would have it done before we'd even get to where we are going.
That's what I found that the majority of school time is
wasted. My personal experience anyway.
So if you want your kids to travel with you and you want to
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be able to write it off, then the kids also need to be part of
the business. And when my kids were little,
they were actually worked in thebusiness and they also were paid
in the business as models. And I'll talk about that on
another podcast. You know, that's one of the
things that I do for my tax clients is I create contracts
between the LLCS and the children to put the children on
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salary as models or as helpers, if you will.
You know, whether it's they're cleaning the company car,
they're cleaning the offices, they're, you know, shredding the
documents or whatever it is in your business that you're doing.
When I had a construction company, my kids would create
that would go and pick up nails and screws, etcetera.
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After we finished up at a construction site, I built high
end custom decks and the yards were generally finished with
grass. And so instead of paying my
employees 30, that was getting 35 to 50 bucks an hour to build
a deck, I would pay my kids $15 to $20.00 an hour to pick up the
screws and the nails, etcetera. So depending on what your
business is will determine what your kids do.
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But the easiest way is as a model.
That's what I found anyway. So my tax clients, what I do is
I do all the paperwork between the LLC and the sole
proprietorship or the S Corp andthen the modelling agreement,
the employment contracts to makeit all legal.
Because remember the 3D rule document, so you can defend it,
your deduction. So you want to be able to defend
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your deduction. You cannot defend your deduction
unless you document it. Now, do you have to have the
kids part of the business? Do you have to go through all of
that? Only if you want to write off
their airfare, their food and their portion of the hotel room
if they're over the age that youwant them not staying in the
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room with you and your spouse. So if you don't care, you know
they're a three-year old and they don't eat that much, you're
not buying a, you're not buying a plane ticket for them and
they're still staying in the same hotel room with you, then
that probably doesn't matter. But if they're teenagers and you
want them to have their own roomand you have to buy their own
airfare and you got to feed them, especially if they're a
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teenage boy, then they're going to have to be part of the
business or you're going to simply not be able to write off
their portion of the travel. And they can, they can still
come with you to where you writeoff your travel, you write off
your spouse's travel, their portion if they're part of the
business and you write off your children's portion if they're
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part of the business. So I, I talked about what
qualifies as legitimate businesstravel.
Now here's something that you got to be really careful with
with international travel. See, travelling inside the
United States, the IRS, they understand that, you know, as a
business owner, especially if you're going to conferences and
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seminars and stuff like that inside the United States, that
makes sense. Really where I see business
owners getting in trouble is when they're travelling
internationally and they have noreason to.
So I did recently review an audit case where a court case
where a guy had gotten audited and he got audited and the
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travel portion came up and he ended up losing the audit.
And what happened was he, he wasa farmer and he went to Europe
where the the the manufacturer was.
And what he did is he took his entire family and it wasn't for
business purpose. It literally was a vacation that
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he cheated and said it was for business purpose, that he went
to the factory to see one of thetractors and he lost the court
case because he could have simply just gone down the street
not too far from where he lived to the tractor dealership to see
the tractor. See the problem with that?
He was claiming that the trip toEurope, the 10s of thousands of
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dollars, was a required businesstrip to look at tractors, when
really he could have just gone down the street or maybe just
got in an airplane or car and drove to where the dealership
was. Now, does that mean you can't do
any international travel? No, that that's a possibility if
it's ordinary and necessary for your business.
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So in his case, if he had to go to Europe because he was a
supplier of the tractor, if he was a tractor dealership, then
that would make sense why you would go to the factory where
they make the tractor. But as a consumer, someone who
just bought the tractor, it doesn't make sense that you have
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to go to the the factory to see how it's made.
So he lost it. So with international travel,
you got to be really careful that you document why you're
there, what you did when you were there, who you talked to
when you're there so you can meet the 3DS document, defend so
you can deduct it. Do you have collections, charge
(12:54):
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(13:16):
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(13:43):
So with international travel, I would recommend that, and this
is what I recommend to my tax clients is if you do travel
internationally, make sure it's for a seminar or a conference
where someone else is putting iton that you actually paid to go
there. So like I'm here in Cancun, it's
five days, it's put on by entrepreneurs organization.
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I paid $15,000 to be here and they brought in speaker labs and
their employees and we're going to spend the next 5 days in a
conference room doing the training.
I have the agenda, the whole thing.
So if I ever got audited, that'sreally easy and simple for me to
say. Well, here's what I did, you
know? But if you are going to travel
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outside of the United States, that's what I recommend.
Now, if you're inside the UnitedStates, it's a little bit more
lenient. But even then, you still want to
be able to document what you were doing.
So if you have kids and you're like, oh, I want to go to Disney
World down in Florida and you live in Idaho and you're like,
well, it's February and it's cold, let's go to Disney World
and let's drag the kids down there.
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And you're a plumber and you claim that you just went and met
with a plumbing company in Orlando.
That's not going to work. Now, can you get away with it
for a little while? Sure.
And there's lots of people on social media that will say you
can write it off. Here's The thing is you can
write off anything. You can write off anything until
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you get audited. And if you can't, if you can't
defend it because you don't havethe documentation, you're not
going to be able to deduct it. You know, it's kind of like you
drive around with a bag of cocaine in your trunk for, you
know, for 20 years and never getcaught.
But when you do get caught, you're going away for 20 years.
So don't don't be doing stuff that you can't document and
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defend it. So what is required when you do
go? So what if you're a real estate
agent or real estate investor and you wanted to go to Orlando?
Well, as long as you're going toOrlando for a business purpose,
not as a vacation. The kids can come with you, the
spouse can come with you, and then you need to spend the
majority of the time working in the business, working on the
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business. So for me here in Cancun, it's
pretty straightforward. From 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM for five
days straight. I'm in a conference room.
I got the agenda with 43 other people.
That's pretty simple. But what if you don't have that?
What if you're a real estate investor or a plumber or
Carpenter or any other business and you're not going somewhere
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where it's all documented? So you're not going to a
conference, but rather you're going to look at real estate?
Well, you need to spend the majority of the time working on
the business. So what's the majority of a
time? Well, in the eyes of the IRS,
it's 8 hours, 8 hours every day.The majority of eight hours is 4
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hours and 1 minute. That is the legal definition of
majority of an 8 hour time frame.
The majority of that would be 4 hours and 1 minute.
Now I'm making this, I'm breaking this down, making it
super simple just so we can havesome context and frame around
the 8 hour block or the majorityof the time, because a lot of
times people will say, well, majority of the time is 23 hours
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and 59 minutes in the day. Yes, that is the majority of the
day, but in the eyes of the IRS,it's the majority of the work
day, which is 8 hours. So as long as you spend at least
4 hours, one minute working on your business, then that's the
majority of the time under the law, which is what you're trying
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to do. Now I'm not saying that you
should go on vacation. Call it a business trip and just
write down that you spent 4 hours one day.
Don't be going on business tripsunless you're actually doing
business but it needs to be 4 hours in one day and if you're
going and it's not a conference or a seminar then you need to
have some documentation. The other thing you can do as
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your kids get older and they start working with the company
or maybe you have other family members, brothers, sisters,
aunts, uncles, mom, dad that arepart of your company.
Maybe they're part of your board.
See, I teach to have AC Corp, LLCS, Corp combo and with C
Corps you have a board, you havedirectors, you have
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shareholders. And so if you had that type of
structure, AC Corp LLC, S Corp combo, you might have directors
and they might be other family members, they might be other
friends. S Corps, S elections and C Corps
are required to do an annual meeting, at least one meeting
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per year. And in that meeting, you're
required to have the minutes, the documentation of what
happened in that meeting. So if for no other reason other
than your annual minutes, so if you want to travel, if for no
other reason, you can always just do it as your annual
meetings, your corporate meetingand your corporate meeting can
be at your home if you want, where you can rent your home tax
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free to the business up to essentially $750,000 per year.
Or it could be in Cancun at a resort like where I'm at, or it
could be Hawaii, or it could be the Cayman Islands, or it could
be in Aspen. As long as you spend the
majority of the day, the majority of the day under the
IRS is 8 hours. So as long as you spend the
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majority of the day working on your business, then you could
qualify to write it off. So what would qualify as working
on the business? Well, what if you simply talked
about Facebook marketing? What if you talked about
Instagram? What if you talked about social
media in general? What if you talked about your
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TikTok campaign and what you're going to do for the rest of the
year when it comes to your marketing?
Would that qualify? Absolutely.
It would qualify because as a business owner, you have the
right to to strategize what you're going to do for the rest
of the year. Could you also talk about what
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you're going to do with pricing?Could you talk about what you're
going to do with contracts? Could you talk about hires?
What are you going to do with the with the company?
Are you going to put in investments?
Are you going to expand the business?
So there's all these things thatyou're probably already doing,
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at least if you are trying to grow your business and run a
successful business. Most likely you're already doing
all of this stuff. It's just whether or not you're
documenting it and whether or not you're doing it when you
travel. So if you just want to go once a
year to a warm place when it's cold where you live or a cold
place when it's hot where you live, and you're trying to
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figure out how you can do that. One way is to have your annual
meeting with your shareholders, with your members, with your
managers documented. So, for example, it would be
maybe you have it start at 9:00 AM.
So from 9 to 11:00, you and the other members and you put this
in your minutes, you create an agenda.
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From 9:00 to 11:00, Rondi and Amanda and Chastney and Toya and
Indy and Kaden, we met and we talked about social media
marketing and what we were goingto do with it.
Who was going to create the content?
How much money were we going to spend and invest in the company?
What platforms are going to workout best for us?
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Do we want to have landing pagesor squeeze pages or what type of
funnel? And we document from 9:00 to
11:00. That could be from 9:00 to 5:00.
It's up to you. And the beauty of this is it's
your account of what happened. So as long as you have it
documented from 9:00 to 5:00 on Monday with an hour break for
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lunch in the middle, we talked about social media marketing and
how we were going to conquer that this year.
And then on Tuesday, we talked about employees and whether you
talk about you do the review, the yearly review of those
employees, how well they're doing.
You could talk about if you're going to hire new employees, if
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you can talk about if people aregetting raises, you could talk
about bonuses, etcetera. And that could be from 9:00 to
5:00. You need to actually work on the
business in order for it to be abusiness write off.
But again, it's your account of what happens.
It's all based on your documentation of what happened,
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because what happens with it today is, I don't know,
September 9th, I think 2025 and my expenses here with my credit
card, I'm paying for them. And at the end of the year, it's
going to go into the books. By the end of the week, it'll
get reconciled by my bookkeeper.And then at the end of the year,
the profit and loss statement will be created.
And then sometime next year, we'll create the tax return and
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it'll be written off. It's I'm not going to get
audited the day after I file my tax return.
It's not how audits work. If I was going to get audited,
it would probably be in the nexttwo to three years.
So somewhere in 2026, seven or eight at that time, if I got
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audited. And they're like, hey, what was
this trip down to Cancun? I'm like, I don't, I don't
remember. Let me look in my documents.
Oh, that's when I went to Cancunfor Global Speaker Academy
hosted by Entrepreneurs Organization.
And then I can pull up all the documentation and all of the
agenda to defend my deduction. And This is why you need the
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documentation because legally you have to be able to defend.
I mean, you need to document this.
You can't describe like, well, if I get audited, then I'll make
up some stuff that's not, that'snot ethical, that's not legal.
You don't want to be doing that,so you need to spend the
majority of the time working on your business and document that
so you can defend it later if you're ever audited.
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Here's some some things to consider when scheduling the
travel. I'm going to move around a
little bit here. So when you schedule the travel,
let me get a little sip here because my, my throat's getting
dry. So when you schedule your
travel, because you're in control of it for the most part,
like this event started today onMonday, I flew in on Sunday.
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Now the way it works with business travel and writing it
off as you get a travel day there and you get a travel day
back. So you get 2 free days that you
don't have to do business. So I'm doing that in air quotes
business. You don't have to do business in
order to write off 2 days. You get one day for travel there
and one day for travel back, regardless of how long it takes
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you to get there. So if the flight was two hours
and you don't have to work that day, if it was 23 hours, we have
people here that flew in from India, from Australia, from
Tokyo, and so their travel days were a lot longer than my travel
day from Boise. But the IRS doesn't care about
that. It's this is your travel day.
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So you get 2 days the day there,the day back.
So I flew in on Sunday. Now, generally what I would do
is if I wouldn't have been so busy last week and I wanted to
spend some time in Mexico on vacation, I would have flown in
on Friday because the IRS does not require you.
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I shouldn't say the IRS doesn't.The Internal Revenue Code
doesn't require you to work on Saturday and Sunday.
Now, if you heard that humming just start a little bit ago and
you're wondering like, what is going on over there?
Somebody's getting a frozen Margarita made in the bars.
This right over there. Let me show you for all of you
(26:00):
watching this video, it's right there.
There's the bar and they're making margaritas.
Again, I apologize for the audio.
I had this whole thing planned and I had my microphone set up,
very expensive microphone. The camera was a little a little
foggy because of the humidity and I pulled the case off of the
(26:22):
phone and I forgot this was still plugged in and it went
into the pool and it no longer works.
So that's why the quality of sound is not as good as I
planned it to be. So I digressed back up a little
bit. So the Internal Revenue Code
doesn't necessarily require you to work on Saturdays and
Sundays. So if you traveled on a Friday
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and that's your travel day, thenyou don't have to work Saturday
and Sunday. So if I wouldn't have been so
busy the last two weeks, Amanda and I would have flown down on
Friday, spent the rest of the day Friday.
We'd have probably got here around 2:00, spent all day
Friday by the pool in the water,maybe going scuba dive,
(27:09):
whatever. We went to scuba dive the first
day, but you know what I'm saying?
Maybe play round of golf, got a massage because it's my travel
day so I don't have to work on business.
And then Saturday, Sunday, I would do whatever I wanted to
do. Now I can't write off the
entertainment portion of it. That's not allowed.
I could potentially write off the food, potentially write off
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the accommodations for the hotel, but I couldn't
necessarily write off the entertainment because I couldn't
write off the like if I went on a tour, I went over to Cozumel
to go scuba dive and I can't write that off.
There's a saying in taxes and it's pigs get fat, hogs get
slaughtered. Don't be hog.
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Don't try to sneak in the scuba diving.
Just pay for that out of your pocket.
Don't get greedy. Greed is that's what's going to
get you in trouble. And then if you get caught, then
it's just going to open you up for other audits and then go
back up to five years if you getcaught cheating, where normally
they they can only audit you forthree.
So don't, don't, don't break thelaw.
You know, the system is set up in a way that you don't have to
(28:14):
cheat in order to maximize your tax savings benefits and win the
tax game. So you don't have to cheat.
So don't do that. That's just not cool.
So I would have taken flown in on Friday, Remember it's travel
day. Had all day Saturday, all day
Sunday to spend with Amanda. And then Monday morning got up
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fresh, went to my event and thenthe events over at 5:00 on
Friday. And then I have a travel day.
And So what I would dare generally do is I would stay
another. I would stay a few more days.
I'd stay Saturday and Sunday andthen fly home on Monday.
Why? Because that would give me two
more days, three days if you will, that I could stay and not
(29:00):
have to work. Now you have to be able to
justify it. So that'd be pretty easy to
justify Friday not leaving Friday because there's no
flights Friday after 5:00. Well, why didn't you fly home
Saturday? Well, what if it's a lot cheaper
to fly home on Monday and you document that?
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And that's what I generally do is if I stay during the weekend
and I don't fly home until the following week, which would
allow me to write off Monday as a business, the travel day.
I will document and show that itwas cheaper for me to stay
Saturday and Sunday than it was and fly home on Monday than it
was to fly home Saturday. Now the other thing you can do
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is if you can't defend why you stayed a couple days, then you
simply don't deduct that portionof it.
You still get to deduct the airfare, you just might not be
able to deduct the accommodation.
But what if, what if in your documentation you stayed extra
Saturday and Sunday to spend extra time with the other people
(30:08):
that you just spent the week worth networking?
Maybe you're trying to get more business or trying to create
business with those relationships.
So as long as you can defend it,you can deduct it and then just
make sure you document it. Starting to get starting to get
eaten by mosquitoes. If you're watching this on video
and I look like a crackhead itching, that's why 'cause the
(30:31):
mosquitoes are bite me. So when you travel, just
remember you get one day there without having to work and one
day back without having to work.Now, if you decide that you're
going to take some time off during the week, then you just
can't deduct that part. So let's say that this event was
(30:53):
done on Wednesday. I got my travel day on Friday.
I spent Saturday and Sunday on the beach with my girlfriend.
On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Wednesday, the event was over.
I could easily find home Thursday or Friday.
But let's say I wanted to stay acouple extra days.
Then you don't write that portion off.
(31:14):
You simply don't include that. And that's how you can legally,
ethically, and compliantly writeoff your trip.
So maybe you're not writing off 100% of the expenses, you're
only writing off a portion of it.
So remember, pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered.
So I hope that you found value in this very unique podcast
(31:36):
today from the pool of the Nyzek.
I think it's Nyzek. It's NIZUK Nyzek Resort and Spa
in Cancun, Mexico. I hope you found value in it.
If you did share the episode, ifyou're watching on social media,
give it a like, maybe share it. I will see you on the next one.
(31:57):
I'm going to get out because these mosquitoes are starting to
eat me up. So appreciate you remember, it's
not how much money you make that's important, it's how much
money you keep. And it's your responsibility to
learn how to keep more. Have a good day.
76% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and according to
Forbes, 93% of business owners pay more than legally required
to pay an income tax. And nearly 50% of all Americans
have bad credit, but not you, atleast not anymore.
See, this is the school of wealth where you learn how to
(00:21):
maximize your credit, minimize your taxes and multiply your
assets so you can create generational wealth.
Hi, I'm Randy Lambert, certifiedFICO credit professional,
author, speaker and tax strategist.
For the last 20 years, I've helped 10s of thousands of
Americans just like you take control of their money, fix
(00:42):
their credit, wipe out their debt, cut their taxes by 50% and
multiply their assets. If you're ready to break free
from the rat race and start building a life of freedom and
abundance, then you're in the right place.
Welcome to the School of Wealth.I want to welcome to another
(01:03):
episode of the School of Wealth.I'm your host, Rodney Lambeth.
And if you're watching this video, you see that I am not in
my normal studio. And if you're listening to this,
you will notice that the audio quality is probably not what you
expected. And that is because I am in
Cancun, Mexico, in the pool at the resort with the ocean behind
me. So I thought what better placed
(01:27):
than the pool to do a podcast and update and why don't I do
it? On the topic of writing off
business travel, See, earlier today I had a young lady asked
me what I did. And I was, I'm here with a group
of 42 different business owners at a speaker Academy.
(01:49):
And we are all learning how to get better at public speaking.
And even though I've done a lot of public speaking over the last
20 years of my financial career as a credit expert and tax
strategist, you can always get better.
And so she asked me, like, what is it you do?
And so I told her I said, you know, I help people with their
money and their credit, maximizing their credit,
(02:09):
minimizing their debt and taxes and multiplying their assets.
And she asked a few more questions as those conversations
tend to go and taxes came up. And I said, yeah, you know, like
I teach people how to to travel the world and essentially get
the IRS to pay for it. Now, the IRS obviously does not
send you a check to pay for it. It's just another way of saying
(02:33):
to write it off. So today on this very special
episode, as I sip on tequila andsoda, I thought I would spend a
little bit of time just going over how to legally ethically
reduce your income taxes and howto legally and ethically write
(02:55):
off business travel. Now I have a rule when it comes
to any of my tax strategies and write offs and that is the
triple D rule and that is need to be able to document it so you
can defend it when you deduct it.
So that is the triple D rule document, defend, deduct.
(03:18):
So in order to write off business travel, whether it's
for you, your spouse, your children, what you actually need
to do and what actually what qualifies as business travel.
Now under IRS Code 162 A, it says that anything that's
ordinary and necessary for the business essentially to make
(03:41):
money to stay in business can bea tax write off.
So remember that anything that'sordinary and necessary.
So is it ordinary and necessary to travel as a business owner?
Well, it depends on your business.
You know, if you are a plumber and you primarily get all of
(04:04):
your business in the area that you live, then it might not be
ordinary and necessary as a plumber to travel to Cancun like
where I'm at right now. However, if there was a plumbing
convention where you could go and spend time with other
(04:25):
plumbers, marketing agents, AI specialist, tax strategist,
etcetera, and you can learn how to take your plumbing business
to the next level, well then that would be ordinary and
necessary. But how do you bring your spouse
with you? Well, your spouse would need to
be part of the business if you were going to deduct their
(04:48):
portion of the trip. Now, if you're not going to
deduct your your spouse's portion of the trip, then hey,
look, then they don't have to bepart of the company.
But if you want to maximize the tax code so you can maximize the
deductions, so you can maximize the savings, then one of the
strategies is to have your spouse be part of the business.
(05:10):
Now I have found with working with thousands of business
owners over the last 20, now 20 plus years, that generally if
your spouse is involved in your business, your business going to
do better than if your spouse isnot part of your business.
And that's because if you're working on it together, then you
(05:32):
understand the problems with it together and you're spending
time together and it's, you know, 2 is stronger than one
where if, whereas the, the clients that I have that only
one of the spouses is doing the business and the other has their
own job, there's struggles there.
So I always recommend to my clients that both parties, both
people in the relationship, if you're married, work on the
(05:55):
business. It just makes it stronger
because what you might be strongin your spouse might not be, you
know, and financially there's always generally there's a
spender in the relationship and there's a saver in the
relationship. You know, opposites attract.
So if you do have a spouse and you wanted to bring your spouse
with you to do the travel, they would need to be part of the
(06:17):
business, whether it's the bookkeeper, the CFO, the
marketing agent, HR, etcetera. They don't have to necessarily
be a full time employees, so it's not like they they can't
have another job, but they have to be actively engaged in the
business in order for you to write off their portion of the
business travel. Now what about the kids?
(06:39):
Children, you know, when I, whenmy kids were younger, they would
travel anywhere I went. They, I would take them with,
with me. And one of the things they did
differently than most parents isI didn't really care about
whether they missed school or not.
If, you know, obviously if they had a big game coming up or a
test. But if it was just another
(07:01):
ordinary day at school or another ordinary week and I had
a business trip in Cozumel or Hawaii or Florida or Colorado, I
would take my kids out of schooland take them with me.
Because I felt that travel was as important, if not more
important than sitting in schoolall day.
(07:23):
Because they could just easily make it up the following week.
And a lot of times they'd get their homework up front and they
would have it done before we'd even get to where we are going.
That's what I found that the majority of school time is
wasted. My personal experience anyway.
So if you want your kids to travel with you and you want to
(07:43):
be able to write it off, then the kids also need to be part of
the business. And when my kids were little,
they were actually worked in thebusiness and they also were paid
in the business as models. And I'll talk about that on
another podcast. You know, that's one of the
things that I do for my tax clients is I create contracts
between the LLCS and the children to put the children on
(08:05):
salary as models or as helpers, if you will.
You know, whether it's they're cleaning the company car,
they're cleaning the offices, they're, you know, shredding the
documents or whatever it is in your business that you're doing.
When I had a construction company, my kids would create
that would go and pick up nails and screws, etcetera.
(08:28):
After we finished up at a construction site, I built high
end custom decks and the yards were generally finished with
grass. And so instead of paying my
employees 30, that was getting 35 to 50 bucks an hour to build
a deck, I would pay my kids $15 to $20.00 an hour to pick up the
screws and the nails, etcetera. So depending on what your
business is will determine what your kids do.
(08:49):
But the easiest way is as a model.
That's what I found anyway. So my tax clients, what I do is
I do all the paperwork between the LLC and the sole
proprietorship or the S Corp andthen the modelling agreement,
the employment contracts to makeit all legal.
Because remember the 3D rule document, so you can defend it,
your deduction. So you want to be able to defend
(09:11):
your deduction. You cannot defend your deduction
unless you document it. Now, do you have to have the
kids part of the business? Do you have to go through all of
that? Only if you want to write off
their airfare, their food and their portion of the hotel room
if they're over the age that youwant them not staying in the
(09:31):
room with you and your spouse. So if you don't care, you know
they're a three-year old and they don't eat that much, you're
not buying a, you're not buying a plane ticket for them and
they're still staying in the same hotel room with you, then
that probably doesn't matter. But if they're teenagers and you
want them to have their own roomand you have to buy their own
airfare and you got to feed them, especially if they're a
(09:53):
teenage boy, then they're going to have to be part of the
business or you're going to simply not be able to write off
their portion of the travel. And they can, they can still
come with you to where you writeoff your travel, you write off
your spouse's travel, their portion if they're part of the
business and you write off your children's portion if they're
(10:16):
part of the business. So I, I talked about what
qualifies as legitimate businesstravel.
Now here's something that you got to be really careful with
with international travel. See, travelling inside the
United States, the IRS, they understand that, you know, as a
business owner, especially if you're going to conferences and
(10:39):
seminars and stuff like that inside the United States, that
makes sense. Really where I see business
owners getting in trouble is when they're travelling
internationally and they have noreason to.
So I did recently review an audit case where a court case
where a guy had gotten audited and he got audited and the
(11:01):
travel portion came up and he ended up losing the audit.
And what happened was he, he wasa farmer and he went to Europe
where the the the manufacturer was.
And what he did is he took his entire family and it wasn't for
business purpose. It literally was a vacation that
(11:24):
he cheated and said it was for business purpose, that he went
to the factory to see one of thetractors and he lost the court
case because he could have simply just gone down the street
not too far from where he lived to the tractor dealership to see
the tractor. See the problem with that?
He was claiming that the trip toEurope, the 10s of thousands of
(11:49):
dollars, was a required businesstrip to look at tractors, when
really he could have just gone down the street or maybe just
got in an airplane or car and drove to where the dealership
was. Now, does that mean you can't do
any international travel? No, that that's a possibility if
it's ordinary and necessary for your business.
(12:09):
So in his case, if he had to go to Europe because he was a
supplier of the tractor, if he was a tractor dealership, then
that would make sense why you would go to the factory where
they make the tractor. But as a consumer, someone who
just bought the tractor, it doesn't make sense that you have
(12:31):
to go to the the factory to see how it's made.
So he lost it. So with international travel,
you got to be really careful that you document why you're
there, what you did when you were there, who you talked to
when you're there so you can meet the 3DS document, defend so
you can deduct it. Do you have collections, charge
(12:54):
offs, even repos on your credit report?
Let me tell you what not to do. Don't ignore it and don't
overpay it. See, most people either panic or
they pay full price, or they bury their head in the sand and
let their credit rot until they get sued.
At Fortress, we help you restructure your debt, settle it
for a fraction of what you owe, and because of the way we
(13:16):
negotiate with the banks and thecollection companies, we often
can get it removed from your credit report as well.
Now a lot of the time the creditor will agree to delete it
upfront. This isn't a trick, it's a
strategy. So click the link in the bio to
learn more or go to fortressu.com.
(13:43):
So with international travel, I would recommend that, and this
is what I recommend to my tax clients is if you do travel
internationally, make sure it's for a seminar or a conference
where someone else is putting iton that you actually paid to go
there. So like I'm here in Cancun, it's
five days, it's put on by entrepreneurs organization.
(14:04):
I paid $15,000 to be here and they brought in speaker labs and
their employees and we're going to spend the next 5 days in a
conference room doing the training.
I have the agenda, the whole thing.
So if I ever got audited, that'sreally easy and simple for me to
say. Well, here's what I did, you
know? But if you are going to travel
(14:26):
outside of the United States, that's what I recommend.
Now, if you're inside the UnitedStates, it's a little bit more
lenient. But even then, you still want to
be able to document what you were doing.
So if you have kids and you're like, oh, I want to go to Disney
World down in Florida and you live in Idaho and you're like,
well, it's February and it's cold, let's go to Disney World
and let's drag the kids down there.
(14:47):
And you're a plumber and you claim that you just went and met
with a plumbing company in Orlando.
That's not going to work. Now, can you get away with it
for a little while? Sure.
And there's lots of people on social media that will say you
can write it off. Here's The thing is you can
write off anything. You can write off anything until
(15:09):
you get audited. And if you can't, if you can't
defend it because you don't havethe documentation, you're not
going to be able to deduct it. You know, it's kind of like you
drive around with a bag of cocaine in your trunk for, you
know, for 20 years and never getcaught.
But when you do get caught, you're going away for 20 years.
So don't don't be doing stuff that you can't document and
(15:30):
defend it. So what is required when you do
go? So what if you're a real estate
agent or real estate investor and you wanted to go to Orlando?
Well, as long as you're going toOrlando for a business purpose,
not as a vacation. The kids can come with you, the
spouse can come with you, and then you need to spend the
majority of the time working in the business, working on the
(15:54):
business. So for me here in Cancun, it's
pretty straightforward. From 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM for five
days straight. I'm in a conference room.
I got the agenda with 43 other people.
That's pretty simple. But what if you don't have that?
What if you're a real estate investor or a plumber or
Carpenter or any other business and you're not going somewhere
(16:20):
where it's all documented? So you're not going to a
conference, but rather you're going to look at real estate?
Well, you need to spend the majority of the time working on
the business. So what's the majority of a
time? Well, in the eyes of the IRS,
it's 8 hours, 8 hours every day.The majority of eight hours is 4
(16:48):
hours and 1 minute. That is the legal definition of
majority of an 8 hour time frame.
The majority of that would be 4 hours and 1 minute.
Now I'm making this, I'm breaking this down, making it
super simple just so we can havesome context and frame around
the 8 hour block or the majorityof the time, because a lot of
times people will say, well, majority of the time is 23 hours
(17:11):
and 59 minutes in the day. Yes, that is the majority of the
day, but in the eyes of the IRS,it's the majority of the work
day, which is 8 hours. So as long as you spend at least
4 hours, one minute working on your business, then that's the
majority of the time under the law, which is what you're trying
(17:32):
to do. Now I'm not saying that you
should go on vacation. Call it a business trip and just
write down that you spent 4 hours one day.
Don't be going on business tripsunless you're actually doing
business but it needs to be 4 hours in one day and if you're
going and it's not a conference or a seminar then you need to
have some documentation. The other thing you can do as
(17:55):
your kids get older and they start working with the company
or maybe you have other family members, brothers, sisters,
aunts, uncles, mom, dad that arepart of your company.
Maybe they're part of your board.
See, I teach to have AC Corp, LLCS, Corp combo and with C
Corps you have a board, you havedirectors, you have
(18:16):
shareholders. And so if you had that type of
structure, AC Corp LLC, S Corp combo, you might have directors
and they might be other family members, they might be other
friends. S Corps, S elections and C Corps
are required to do an annual meeting, at least one meeting
(18:38):
per year. And in that meeting, you're
required to have the minutes, the documentation of what
happened in that meeting. So if for no other reason other
than your annual minutes, so if you want to travel, if for no
other reason, you can always just do it as your annual
meetings, your corporate meetingand your corporate meeting can
be at your home if you want, where you can rent your home tax
(19:02):
free to the business up to essentially $750,000 per year.
Or it could be in Cancun at a resort like where I'm at, or it
could be Hawaii, or it could be the Cayman Islands, or it could
be in Aspen. As long as you spend the
majority of the day, the majority of the day under the
IRS is 8 hours. So as long as you spend the
(19:23):
majority of the day working on your business, then you could
qualify to write it off. So what would qualify as working
on the business? Well, what if you simply talked
about Facebook marketing? What if you talked about
Instagram? What if you talked about social
media in general? What if you talked about your
(19:45):
TikTok campaign and what you're going to do for the rest of the
year when it comes to your marketing?
Would that qualify? Absolutely.
It would qualify because as a business owner, you have the
right to to strategize what you're going to do for the rest
of the year. Could you also talk about what
(20:05):
you're going to do with pricing?Could you talk about what you're
going to do with contracts? Could you talk about hires?
What are you going to do with the with the company?
Are you going to put in investments?
Are you going to expand the business?
So there's all these things thatyou're probably already doing,
(20:27):
at least if you are trying to grow your business and run a
successful business. Most likely you're already doing
all of this stuff. It's just whether or not you're
documenting it and whether or not you're doing it when you
travel. So if you just want to go once a
year to a warm place when it's cold where you live or a cold
place when it's hot where you live, and you're trying to
(20:47):
figure out how you can do that. One way is to have your annual
meeting with your shareholders, with your members, with your
managers documented. So, for example, it would be
maybe you have it start at 9:00 AM.
So from 9 to 11:00, you and the other members and you put this
in your minutes, you create an agenda.
(21:09):
From 9:00 to 11:00, Rondi and Amanda and Chastney and Toya and
Indy and Kaden, we met and we talked about social media
marketing and what we were goingto do with it.
Who was going to create the content?
How much money were we going to spend and invest in the company?
What platforms are going to workout best for us?
(21:30):
Do we want to have landing pagesor squeeze pages or what type of
funnel? And we document from 9:00 to
11:00. That could be from 9:00 to 5:00.
It's up to you. And the beauty of this is it's
your account of what happened. So as long as you have it
documented from 9:00 to 5:00 on Monday with an hour break for
(21:55):
lunch in the middle, we talked about social media marketing and
how we were going to conquer that this year.
And then on Tuesday, we talked about employees and whether you
talk about you do the review, the yearly review of those
employees, how well they're doing.
You could talk about if you're going to hire new employees, if
(22:17):
you can talk about if people aregetting raises, you could talk
about bonuses, etcetera. And that could be from 9:00 to
5:00. You need to actually work on the
business in order for it to be abusiness write off.
But again, it's your account of what happens.
It's all based on your documentation of what happened,
(22:39):
because what happens with it today is, I don't know,
September 9th, I think 2025 and my expenses here with my credit
card, I'm paying for them. And at the end of the year, it's
going to go into the books. By the end of the week, it'll
get reconciled by my bookkeeper.And then at the end of the year,
the profit and loss statement will be created.
And then sometime next year, we'll create the tax return and
(23:04):
it'll be written off. It's I'm not going to get
audited the day after I file my tax return.
It's not how audits work. If I was going to get audited,
it would probably be in the nexttwo to three years.
So somewhere in 2026, seven or eight at that time, if I got
(23:25):
audited. And they're like, hey, what was
this trip down to Cancun? I'm like, I don't, I don't
remember. Let me look in my documents.
Oh, that's when I went to Cancunfor Global Speaker Academy
hosted by Entrepreneurs Organization.
And then I can pull up all the documentation and all of the
agenda to defend my deduction. And This is why you need the
(23:47):
documentation because legally you have to be able to defend.
I mean, you need to document this.
You can't describe like, well, if I get audited, then I'll make
up some stuff that's not, that'snot ethical, that's not legal.
You don't want to be doing that,so you need to spend the
majority of the time working on your business and document that
so you can defend it later if you're ever audited.
(24:10):
Here's some some things to consider when scheduling the
travel. I'm going to move around a
little bit here. So when you schedule the travel,
let me get a little sip here because my, my throat's getting
dry. So when you schedule your
travel, because you're in control of it for the most part,
like this event started today onMonday, I flew in on Sunday.
(24:36):
Now the way it works with business travel and writing it
off as you get a travel day there and you get a travel day
back. So you get 2 free days that you
don't have to do business. So I'm doing that in air quotes
business. You don't have to do business in
order to write off 2 days. You get one day for travel there
and one day for travel back, regardless of how long it takes
(24:59):
you to get there. So if the flight was two hours
and you don't have to work that day, if it was 23 hours, we have
people here that flew in from India, from Australia, from
Tokyo, and so their travel days were a lot longer than my travel
day from Boise. But the IRS doesn't care about
that. It's this is your travel day.
(25:19):
So you get 2 days the day there,the day back.
So I flew in on Sunday. Now, generally what I would do
is if I wouldn't have been so busy last week and I wanted to
spend some time in Mexico on vacation, I would have flown in
on Friday because the IRS does not require you.
(25:40):
I shouldn't say the IRS doesn't.The Internal Revenue Code
doesn't require you to work on Saturday and Sunday.
Now, if you heard that humming just start a little bit ago and
you're wondering like, what is going on over there?
Somebody's getting a frozen Margarita made in the bars.
This right over there. Let me show you for all of you
(26:00):
watching this video, it's right there.
There's the bar and they're making margaritas.
Again, I apologize for the audio.
I had this whole thing planned and I had my microphone set up,
very expensive microphone. The camera was a little a little
foggy because of the humidity and I pulled the case off of the
(26:22):
phone and I forgot this was still plugged in and it went
into the pool and it no longer works.
So that's why the quality of sound is not as good as I
planned it to be. So I digressed back up a little
bit. So the Internal Revenue Code
doesn't necessarily require you to work on Saturdays and
Sundays. So if you traveled on a Friday
(26:46):
and that's your travel day, thenyou don't have to work Saturday
and Sunday. So if I wouldn't have been so
busy the last two weeks, Amanda and I would have flown down on
Friday, spent the rest of the day Friday.
We'd have probably got here around 2:00, spent all day
Friday by the pool in the water,maybe going scuba dive,
(27:09):
whatever. We went to scuba dive the first
day, but you know what I'm saying?
Maybe play round of golf, got a massage because it's my travel
day so I don't have to work on business.
And then Saturday, Sunday, I would do whatever I wanted to
do. Now I can't write off the
entertainment portion of it. That's not allowed.
I could potentially write off the food, potentially write off
(27:30):
the accommodations for the hotel, but I couldn't
necessarily write off the entertainment because I couldn't
write off the like if I went on a tour, I went over to Cozumel
to go scuba dive and I can't write that off.
There's a saying in taxes and it's pigs get fat, hogs get
slaughtered. Don't be hog.
(27:51):
Don't try to sneak in the scuba diving.
Just pay for that out of your pocket.
Don't get greedy. Greed is that's what's going to
get you in trouble. And then if you get caught, then
it's just going to open you up for other audits and then go
back up to five years if you getcaught cheating, where normally
they they can only audit you forthree.
So don't, don't, don't break thelaw.
You know, the system is set up in a way that you don't have to
(28:14):
cheat in order to maximize your tax savings benefits and win the
tax game. So you don't have to cheat.
So don't do that. That's just not cool.
So I would have taken flown in on Friday, Remember it's travel
day. Had all day Saturday, all day
Sunday to spend with Amanda. And then Monday morning got up
(28:34):
fresh, went to my event and thenthe events over at 5:00 on
Friday. And then I have a travel day.
And So what I would dare generally do is I would stay
another. I would stay a few more days.
I'd stay Saturday and Sunday andthen fly home on Monday.
Why? Because that would give me two
more days, three days if you will, that I could stay and not
(29:00):
have to work. Now you have to be able to
justify it. So that'd be pretty easy to
justify Friday not leaving Friday because there's no
flights Friday after 5:00. Well, why didn't you fly home
Saturday? Well, what if it's a lot cheaper
to fly home on Monday and you document that?
(29:21):
And that's what I generally do is if I stay during the weekend
and I don't fly home until the following week, which would
allow me to write off Monday as a business, the travel day.
I will document and show that itwas cheaper for me to stay
Saturday and Sunday than it was and fly home on Monday than it
was to fly home Saturday. Now the other thing you can do
(29:44):
is if you can't defend why you stayed a couple days, then you
simply don't deduct that portionof it.
You still get to deduct the airfare, you just might not be
able to deduct the accommodation.
But what if, what if in your documentation you stayed extra
Saturday and Sunday to spend extra time with the other people
(30:08):
that you just spent the week worth networking?
Maybe you're trying to get more business or trying to create
business with those relationships.
So as long as you can defend it,you can deduct it and then just
make sure you document it. Starting to get starting to get
eaten by mosquitoes. If you're watching this on video
and I look like a crackhead itching, that's why 'cause the
(30:31):
mosquitoes are bite me. So when you travel, just
remember you get one day there without having to work and one
day back without having to work.Now, if you decide that you're
going to take some time off during the week, then you just
can't deduct that part. So let's say that this event was
(30:53):
done on Wednesday. I got my travel day on Friday.
I spent Saturday and Sunday on the beach with my girlfriend.
On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Wednesday, the event was over.
I could easily find home Thursday or Friday.
But let's say I wanted to stay acouple extra days.
Then you don't write that portion off.
(31:14):
You simply don't include that. And that's how you can legally,
ethically, and compliantly writeoff your trip.
So maybe you're not writing off 100% of the expenses, you're
only writing off a portion of it.
So remember, pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered.
So I hope that you found value in this very unique podcast
(31:36):
today from the pool of the Nyzek.
I think it's Nyzek. It's NIZUK Nyzek Resort and Spa
in Cancun, Mexico. I hope you found value in it.
If you did share the episode, ifyou're watching on social media,
give it a like, maybe share it. I will see you on the next one.
(31:57):
I'm going to get out because these mosquitoes are starting to
eat me up. So appreciate you remember, it's
not how much money you make that's important, it's how much
money you keep. And it's your responsibility to
learn how to keep more. Have a good day.
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