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Also, uniquely in the USA, interest payments on debt can be deducted from your income. There are some caveats to deducting this from personal taxes rather than business taxes, but in general if you can show your personally used the loan for business purposes, you can use the Schedule C form to deduct the interest on it from your personal income to lower taxes paid.
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Deduction of interest against revenue isn't allowed in other countries for business purposes?

I know the home mortgage deduction might be somewhat unique, but interest costs seem a business expense pretty clearly.


In the NL the one who provides the loan is supposed to do that against a normal interest rate, which is a capital gain subject to tax. So this trick would not work here afaik, because now there is still a party paying taxes.

What about the "default on the loan" backdoor? Would that work?

Let's say I sell you my business for $1 million. You give me a loan for $1,2 million. The money is transferred into my account. I pay 2% interest for 10 years and then I default on the loan. You do nothing to recover the money.

Tax free sale, no?


I had a few colleagues in the UK that tried this to avoid taxes. The tax services generally don't look too kindly on that sort of arrangements. Searching for "Loan charge" should surface quite a few distressed stories.

In the USA this is taxed as if the loan was forgiven - so one side or the other pays the tax.

There are ways to abuse the bankruptcy laws, but they are difficult and time consuming and usually not worth it.


You may be right. I might be misremembering or overgeneralizing some articles about mortgage interest deductions.



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