June Walker, a tax advisor to the independent / soloist / self-employed and home office business community since 1979, has guided indies through various tax issues for years.

Today, she offers some guidance on handling business and travel expenses. To June, the questions seem the same: Travel expenses, transportation expenses, vehicle expenses – aren’t they all more or less the same thing?

Well, maybe to you they are, June says. But not to the IRS. There are subtle and there are grand differences. Understanding standard business travel and the expenses related to a typical business trip is the place to start.

Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house goes Pat Personal Trainer. Gram just bought a color laser printer and it’s the cheapest way for Pat to print his new brochures. He leaves Friday afternoon. The bus gets him there in time for dinner. He works at the computer all the next day until the wee hours. (He’s sure these new brochures will get him lots of customers.) Very early the next morning he kisses Grandma good-bye and heads back home on the bus.

Pat was away from his home, for business, overnight. It was BUSINESS TRAVEL. Therefore he may deduct travel expenses.

The IRS says this about BUSINESS TRAVEL . . .

Read More »

Home office, telework and road warrior technology tips from leading home-business and work-at-home expert Jeff Zbar will be featured in more than two million copies of TIME, Fortune and Money magazines and Time Inc. websites beginning this week.

In a unique promotional campaign for Marriott International Inc.’s Residence Inn brand, Zbar provides two dozen tips on remote work strategies, “cloud” computing and online security. The tips are presented on “bookmarks” bound into the magazines and linked to from the websites. View the bookmark here.

“Road warriors, digital nomads and others who work from the road don’t want to struggle or just get by. They want to thrive – no matter where work and life take them,” said Zbar, creator of Chief Home Officer and Home Office Highway, a site focused on extended, working vacations. “Residence Inn’s campaign reveals in simple detail how easy it can be to achieve location independence and to connect and compute from a workspace other than the home or corporate office.”

The Residence Inn campaign, “Master The Long Trip” appears in the October 26 issues of TIME and Fortune, and the November issue of Money. The online tips debuted on CNNMoney on October 19, and will run through November 30. The tips also appear on Sports Illustrated.com. Read More »

After two weeks on the road, it’s the simple observations that bring clarity to the home office adventure. Like…

– Sponsor or no, the Verizon Mifi ‘personal hotspot’ won the day — hands down. It was a true fan favorite and winner of the HOH’09 Product of Choice. Hey, anything that keeps the hoards from beating me up for my Internet connection is worthy of praise. Teleworkers and road warriors alike will find this tool extremely useful.

-Yes, family, we WILL survive two weeks without a TV. And we did. We talked, played more Yahtzee and Racko than we ever thought possible, and watched burning embers in the fire pit. And yes, we surfed the Web. A lot. Truth be told, we watched a few DVD movies on Zack’s HP laptop. But that’s NOT TV.

– Open a bag of animal crackers, and a dog’s nose knows. “Food, food, food…”

– “Yes, Mom, Spaghetti-Ohs make a perfectly suitable breakfast.”

Belkin Clap On Surge Suppressor

– Success is in the gadgets you choose. Like the Belkin Clamp On surge suppressor that, well, clamped on to the edge of the bunk and supplied power to all our gadgets (no small feat, given the number of gadgets we employed).

– When plugs aren’t available, old-fashioned cigarette lighters will work. Just the ticket for the Scosche reCoil retractable car charger for iPod and iPhone.

– Netbooks beget adaptors and accessories. And manufacturers are responding. The Targus Netbook Accessory Kit includes a nifty USB hub, a travel mouse and a slip case for netbooks with screens up to 10.1 inches. Read More »

Packing wisely makes the difference between success and frustration on the road.

To paraphrase the once-almost-ubiquitous line from a popular credit-card commercial, ‘What’s in your backpack’?’

Whether a family cruise or a two-week road trip, I make sure to pack my backpack with all the essentials needed to create a home office from the road. And with every trip, I find something new to stash in my travel case. I’m sure road warriors and teleworkers go through the same exercise.

Along side my MSI Wind netbook and Verizon Mifi personal hotspot, Below are the 10 (or so) must-pack accessories I carry with me:

– My laptops and netbooks don’t have card readers. So I carry a card reader and USB flash drive so I can import the scores of photographs I’ll shoot each day. Read More »

Wonder what technology drives the home office highway?

Discover as I discuss the topic with Jim Blasingame with Small Business Advocate. A hint: Mifi, a netbook, the Cloud — and a barking dog. The pleasures and realities of live radio — from a rocking chair at the General Store at Stone Mountain Park Campground. It’s even good for telework and road warriors, if they want to work from an RV…

The road traveled, so far...

Four days into Home Office Highway ’09 and we’ve seen a great deal of Florida and Georgia.

We’ve traveled about 10% of the trip on country backroads, so we’ve seen more of Real America than we have in the past.

A sampling of snapshots from the trip thus far: Upper left (and me in hat), tubing down the Itchetucknee River in North Central Florida; top center and right, Stella enjoying my harmonica playing, then asleep on her perch: My Foray Mobile Workmate; lower right, Robbie sending a Bunk Note to Zoe on the MSI netbook; lower left, the campsite home office: the netbook, Verizon Gz’One Boulder, and a cup of coffee.

These are the images memories are made from…

Night surfing with the Verizon MiFi and the MSI U123 netbook.

Years ago, surfing in public meant first paying $15 an hour for a user ID and password hand-written on a scrap of paper so you could log on to some cyber cafe’s network.

Now, it’s as easy as hitting the MiFi, powering up the netbook — and in less than a minute, you’re up.

This year’s home office highway is shaping up as an exercise in simplified surfing. Last year, setting up a network meant powering up and wiring in a router the size of a cigar box. This year’s “access point” is a business card-sized device that enables five Internet devices — netbooks, laptops, MP3 players, an iTouch — to log on simultaneously. Read More »