I'm also renting my RV. I converted this RV from a used van myself, it was basically valueless when I bought it, and after a L-O-T of work now rents pretty well for $150/night.
After gaining some experiences with real world maintenance costs I sat down and did an estimated cost per mile so I'd know what to charge long distance renters.
It came out to around .35 / mile. Which also happens to be about what you'd get if you subtracted the fuel costs from the Federal rate of .55 / mile.
(Estimated depreciation, tires, oil, fluids, brakes, expected life and costs of engine, transmission, etc, plus my experiential real world of how often does it breaks down and needs $1500 thrown at it)
So, I was planning to use $.35 / mile as a "cost". I'm I wrong to do that? 5 year depreciation doesn't really reflect that driving it further costs me more money. (it does, almost every trip over 3k miles has needed mechanical attention, only one short trip 500 miles needed something anything) Ideally, I'll be renting this vehicle long past 5 years, at which point I'll still be putting money into it roughly proportional to the miles being put on it.
I don't have significant itemized expenses, at least not on the order of the mileage amount.
Some particulars:
in 2019 I had about 6,000 rental miles put on it.
in 2020 it will be about 25,000 rental miles.
Interestingly, that's on income of about ~$6k in 2019 and probably ~$25k in 2020.
Edit: Oh I see, you can't just put in a "custom" lower mileage rate of $.35 / mile. It's just always $.58.
Could I put in 60% of my actual 6,000 miles and write a little note on the tax form explaining what I'm doing? (.35/.58) is 60% Or does the IRS not work like that?
Could I put in an "other expense" of .35*6000 = $2,100? And explain it somehow also in a note?
Or am I asking for trouble and I should just basically forgo the deduction. Not the end of the world, it's $1000 in 2019, but probably $4,000+ in 2020.
