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Only for the percent of use for your Free Lance business that you are doing as a nonemployee. As cbslee pointed out, you can no longer deduct the portion related to employment due to TCJA. Your continued use an an employee does not trigger the exclusive use disallowance. Reg 1280A-2(g)(1) explains that exclusive use means the office cannot be used for nonbusiness purposes. Therefore you still meet the exclusive use test even though your employee use is no longer deductible since it is not considered personal use. What you need to do is allocate the amount of time spent in your office for your free lance business and deduct that portion. ATX has a window for inputting the percent of each business.

Thanks for the well wishes and advice. As far as "the account"...with 95% accuracy, my son would never take money from this account (he lives well within his salary....one might call him frugal)....it would definitely be best to just name him beneficiary. Hopefully it will end up a "large account" because an annuity distribution will be contributed monthly "forever". (Annuity has low tax cost basis and high current value....tax nightmare...so I'm spreading it over as many years as possible.) Until 2020 retirement was great...lots of cruises, shows, restaurants....the good life. Now...supermarket, tv...etc The best thing about retirement is that I don't have to keep up with tax changes!

He is okay per Reg 1280A-2(g)(1).

I agree with Margaret. To answer your question though, yes, 1/2 of the deposit into a new brokerage account would be considered a gift to your son if putting his name on the account. A benefit to doing as Margaret suggests is that if the account is in your name, at your death and transfer, your son would get a step up (or down) in basis and wouldn't pay income tax on that growth if he sold it.

Thanks....yeah, I think I'll just make him the beneficiary. Yes...5 years. Sold the business Oct 2015.

Small separate desk for the 9-5 work. Can be in the same room as the home office space, but the sqft must not be counted towards the home office usage. Employer should be willing to provide compensation for use of your space and utilities, hopefully accountable basis, or enough to cover your costs and the increased tax (if treated as additional wages). Or remove the sqft shared with the 9-5 use, and only claim the remaining amount (assuming there is some space not shared). If you can document less home office use, you may have a number to show your employer as to your "cost" of the space you are providing.

This particular drive is a hard drive, and it's almost 6 years old. All the other drives in the office are SSD's. Just ran a SMART test on the old HD and got these results: The overall fitness for this drive is 97%. The overall performance for this drive is 97%. Probably time to clone it to a new SSD, but it's all backed up as well. Plus it's not the OS drive and most of the data is not critical.