Hey all,
My wife and I both currently not employed so our income is $0 currently. Earlier this year we formed an LLC as we are in the process of getting a patent on a new product that we are bring to market next year.
That said, we currently live full time in a sailboat and have an old car that we are looking at getting rid of and replacing it with an older RV - specifically something from the mid 80's to the early 90's(the Toyota micro class C RV's). Currently our car is pretty much used daily as an office space for myself while I work on our website and generate content that will start to be released next year as well as general business tasks(phone calls/zoom calls, etc). The vehicle gets about 15 miles a week put on it for private use and somewhere around 200-300 miles a week(depending on the week) for business use(going to coffee shops when I need a bathroom break, picking up supplies for testing, driving to post offices to ship test products, driving to/from different potential shops/stores). So currently our vehicle is primarily used for business use, but i haven't really been tracking each and every mile used, so these are just guesstimates.
Switching to an RV that has a table and bathroom would be incredibly nice and even being able to just stand up in my workspace would be awesome. I use our kitchen on our boat to make my sample products for testing and having an RV with a stove & fridge would also be incredibly nice - essentially an RV would make it more "comfortable" for us to continue to do R&D on our product and make our testing samples(I am awaiting my state to determine if an RV kitchen is valid for a Cottage Food Permit - this is a big question that likely would change our mind on an RV but not entirely). The other thing we were thinking was if we had the RV in 2024 when we go to market, we could actually travel to a lot of different trade shows to market our new product throughout the US rather than having to package & ship/fly all our stuff to each location & get a rental car/hotels.
Regardless of the permitting questions, I'm trying to understand:
- is there a benefit to putting the camper/rv under the business name?
- If the vehicle's primary use is for business purposes - be it office space, making products, traveling to/from tradeshows(we have at least 15 different shows in 2024 we'd like to hit with a maximum of 35 on the list).
- Obviously tracking every mile is important - is there downsides to doing this?
- Is a vehicle with a value of $6000-$15000 even worth putting under a business name?
- what about maintenance costs & fuel costs?
Would i just be better off purchasing the RV as a personal asset and doing away with the idea that it's a benefit for the business from tax perspective?
