The Truth About Personal Finance (Collection)

Truth 26. Recouping employee business expenses

Sometimes doing your job means spending your own money. Ideally, you would be reimbursed for your jobrelated expenditures. But that doesn’t always happen.

In those cases, you might be able to write off your employee business expenses.

You must itemize—The first requirement in recouping your unreimbursed business expenses is that you itemize your deductions on Schedule A. You’ll enter them in the section entitled Job Expenses and Certain Miscellaneous Deductions.

Just itemizing, however, is not enough. All of those costs must be more than 2 percent of your adjusted gross income.

Note also that only the amount in excess of the 2 percent threshold is deductible. For example, your adjusted ...