Today we're going to discuss what you need to know to file your Uber and lift taxes and be sure to stick around to the end because we'll summarize some main points. Every year by the end of January, Uber and Lyft send out tax summaries to all drivers. In those summaries, it details how much you earned, what fees were taken out, and how many miles you drove. Some drivers will also get $10.99, they'll get a $10.99 K or a $10.99 MISC, and we'll discuss those in detail in a little bit. And you can access your prior year summaries and tax documents by logging into your dashboard for either company. All right, now as far as the tax summaries, and again, all drivers will get these. Here's a look at Uber's. You can see at the top, they list your completed trips and online miles, and they list your gross earnings, expenses, fees, and tax, and your net payout. And here's what Lyft's tax summary looks like. It'll show your rides again in online miles. It'll also show gross earnings and expenses. All right, so again, all drivers will receive these tax summaries, but some drivers will receive $10.99. They may receive it to $10.99 K or a $10.99 MISC. If you earned over $20,000 in passenger and delivery payments and completed over 200 rides, slash deliveries, you will receive a $10.99 K. And we mentioned deliveries because some of you might have Uber eats income. And here's a look at a $10.99 K from Lyft. And if you look at box 1A, you can see that this driver earned $31,134.36 in gross payments. Now, if you earned less than $20,000 and didn't give 200 rides, you won't receive a $10.99 K from Lyft or Uber, but you still need to report that income. So you'll use the numbers from your tax summary. Okay, now the other $10.99 that you may receive is a $10.99 MISC. If you earned $600 or more from either company of promotion, referral, and other payments for the year, you'll receive a $10.99 MISC. And here's what a $10.99 MISC looks like. You're looking for one number here. It's in box 7. You can see that this driver earned $3,216.55 in non-employee compensation. So now you have all your earning information. Next, what you want to do is make sure you have all of your deductions in order. First, the most important deduction that you have is the cost to operate your vehicle. And you have two options. You can either go with the standard mileage deduction or you can go with your actual expenses. And as we have discussed on the blog, the standard mileage deduction will likely make a lot more financial sense and is much easier to track. And the standard mileage deduction is a universal method that the IRS uses to try and estimate the cost to operate your vehicle. Gas, payment, insurance, standard mileage deduction is what the IRS uses to try and estimate those costs for the year. The standard mileage rate in 2019 was 58 cents per mile. And say you drove 30,000 ride share miles in 2019. You multiply that by .58 and you'd get your deduction of $17,400, a massive deduction. And chances are that standard deduction will be higher than a percentage of your actual expenses for the year. You'll want to make sure what your actual expenses were because you're going to want to go with the higher number, but the standard mileage deduction will probably work best for most drivers. Now, you're hopefully tracking your ride share related mileage throughout the year. Either via a mileage tracking app, the one we recommend is stride. And you can actually sign up for stride using our affiliate link and that is in the description. And you can also track via either a spreadsheet or a logbook. Now, if you didn't track your mileage throughout the year, you're going to want to for sure remember to do it this year. You need to track that mileage meticulously. But if you didn't, you can use those mileage totals on your lift in uber summaries. But that's not the full story. Some of those some of those miles may be overlap miles because your driving were both at the same time. And also you might have miles where you drove for your ride share business to maybe get gas or a car wash. Those are ride share related miles. You want to track those. You want to be able to claim those. Again, just remember to track your mileage meticulously. So, again, that standard mileage deduction is going to be your most important deduction. But what are some other deductions outside of the vehicle that you can claim? Again, these deductions have nothing to do with the standard mileage deduction. These fall outside of that. These are in addition. Okay, the most important thing to remember to deduct are those expenses and fees from your yearly summaries. So with uber, you'll deduct that expenses fees and tax number. So this driver in particular would deduct the $8,651.51 and expenses fees and tax from uber and also all of those expenses from lift the lift platform fees, the service fees and the third party fees. If you use training materials and tools like maximum ride sharing profits, our video course, the ride share guide, our book, any ride share specific apps that you may use. Also, other expenses like cell phone use inspections, airport permits. If you have a Spotify membership, any car washes, and if you're a full-time driver and you purchase private health insurance, you're going to want to make sure that you claim that cost as well. And the expense for the cell phone, for example, you're going to want to claim a percentage. So say 50% of the time you use it for ride share and the other 50% for personal use, you're only going to claim 50% of the cost of the cell phone. Now you have all the necessary information and you're ready to file. You have a few different options to file, but the most popular one to do is to do it yourself via an online service. The one we recommend is TurboTax. I have personally used TurboTax every year for filing my ride share taxes and it works great. And for drivers with $10.99 income, you're going to have to go with TurboTax self-employed. And the cool thing about that is both Uber and Lyft have partnered with TurboTax. So if you use their referral links, you can get $90 off TurboTax self-employed. All right, now let's summarize some main things. Remember, when claiming vehicle expenses, you have a choice between standard mileage rate or a percentage of your actual expenses. And for most drivers, standard mileage rate is going to work out best. So you want to make sure to track your ride share mileage throughout the year meticulously. Also, again, all drivers will get those tax summaries from both Uber and Lyft, but only some drivers will get $10.99. And drivers with $10.99 remember that your $10.99 will include your gross payments. You need to remember to look at your tax summaries and report those expenses, fees, and tax as deductions. Also, if you use a rental car for Lyft or Uber, you can't use the standard mileage deduction, but you can claim the actual expenses for that vehicle, such as the payment, gas, and maintenance payments that you had to make. Just not the standard mileage deduction. Also, there were those other expenses that we discussed. Those are costs for your ride share business that occur outside of the vehicle. So you can claim all of those and those are not included in the standard mileage deduction. So you have the standard mileage deduction, which is the cost to operate your vehicle. And you also have these additional ride share business expenses that occur outside of the vehicle. You claim the standard mileage deduction and you also claim these other expenses on top of the standard mileage deduction. All right, so let us know if you have any other tax questions in the comments below and good luck filing. Thanks again for watching. Please like, comment, or subscribe and drive safe. Thanks.