Thanks so much for this. I see how depreciating them could be advantageous...
I went the depreciation route on TurboTax, just to see how that would go. I could group items into, say: Drums, Accessories, Small Percussion Instruments....etc, and assign an total value for each group. TurboTax asks me whether I owned these items before putting them to use for the business - if I accurately say yes...then it asks for a date an item was acquired. Here's the problem, I simply don't remember, and I don't have receipts - I've got literally scores of items bought at different times, and since I'll be grouping them, it's going to be all mixed up, anyway. So, I'm really struggling with this, since any date I put down is going to be a misrepresentation. On the other hand, I'm already "depreciating" the items by fairly assigning a current value based on their condition. So now the choice seems to be, A) say that I acquired these items this year for my business and assign them a current, "second hand/used", value (in a sense, as if I bought them this year from myself in their current, already discounted condition), OR, B) say they were in personal use before and then make up a date of acquisition. In the latter case, I notice the value of the items gets lower the earlier the assigned date of purchase...and that doesn't really feel fair, since I'm already depreciating their value myself. So, I'm leaning towards #1. Opinions?
