Suddenly Self-Employed? Here's What You Need to Know About Taxes

Keep track of your expenses

You will have to document these expenses, which means keeping receipts. Start saving and compiling receipts as soon as you can. “I always say to people, ‘I can't remember what kind of sandwich we had for lunch yesterday, so you know you can't expect to remember what you did in February, or even three months ago,” says Mackey McNeill, a certified public accountant in Bellevue, Kentucky.

If you're using your own property to create a service — such as driving your car for Uber — you'll also have to keep records of how much time you use your car for the job, and how much you drive it for personal use. If you have an inexpensive car and drive lots of miles, you can use the standard mileage rate — 57.5 cents per business mile, McNeill says. If you have an expensive car and don't drive many miles for your business, then the actual costs may give you a bigger deduction, she says. In either case, you have to keep close track of your expenses. QuickBooks, a popular accounting software program, will track mileage for you, as will Xero and FreshBooks, McNeill says.

And don't overlook the home office deduction. There's a simplified home office deduction: $5 per square foot, up to 300 square feet, or $1,500 per year. “That can be a nice deduction,” McNeill says. But remember that if you report having a dedicated space for your home office, you'll have to prove that space is used for nothing but work if the IRS comes to check.

Don't overlook deductions for your phone, if you use that for business, and your computer, too.

Save for Social Security and Medicare taxes

One challenging part about self-employment is you're responsible for all of your Social Security and Medicare taxes. “That's probably the biggest surprise for people who are self-employed for the first time,” says Nathan Rigney, lead tax research analyst at the Tax Institute at H&R Block.

When you are an employee, your employer pays half the required federal taxes for Social Security and Medicare. When you're self-employed, you're on the hook for the whole amount: 12.4 percent for Social Security and 2.9 percent for Medicare. “There's no real way of softening that blow,” Rigney says.

Social Security taxes apply to the first $132,900 of your income in 2019 and the first $137,700 for 2020. The Medicare tax applies to all your income.

Many people who are involuntarily self-employed have also, at some point, collected unemployment. Those benefits are taxable. You can have taxes withheld from unemployment benefits, but many people choose not to, Rigney says. “They need the cash flow at the time, so they don't have taxes withheld.” The result can be a bigger tax bill than they may have expected.

You need to estimate the Social Security and Medicare taxes as accurately as possible to avoid penalties for withholding too little. You can avoid the penalty if you owe less than $1,000 in tax after subtracting your quarterly tax payments and any tax credits, or if you paid at least 90 percent of the tax due for the current year, or 100 percent of the tax shown on the return for the prior year, whichever is smaller. You use Form 1040-ES, Estimated Tax for Individuals, to make estimated tax payments.

McNeill recommends putting aside 25 percent of all the income you get into a savings account just for taxes. Use the funds in the account to pay your required estimated taxes, which will usually be less than what you save. At the end of the year, once your tax return is prepared, you'll know exactly how much you owe. “If you have extra, you'll be very happy,” says McNeill. You can use those dollars for an IRA [individual retirement account], or just for fun. More importantly, you won't start the next tax year with a big tax bill, or a payment plan from the IRS. Without proper saving it is easy to go from “What an exciting new venture to ‘Wow, how am I going to get out of debt?'” McNeill says.