Legal Adviser: Hiring Your Spouse

Admit it: Your wife helps you run your business. I know because I’ve been there. For years, I answered the phone for my husband’s carpentry business, kept the books, typed the estimates, and scheduled the subs. I even went to the lumberyard to pick up materials and to the site to pick up trash. These are all tasks that you could do yourself, but that would leave you less time to bang nails or sell new jobs. The other alternative is to hire someone to perform this kind of work. In that case, you could deduct that person’s salary and working expenses, which would reduce your taxable profit. But it would also increase your overhead, which