Day care and tax write offs

Deardra77 · February 2014

Hi ladies, I don't regularly post on this board so hope it's ok to barge in and ask this question. My apologies is this has been asked before. I tired doing a search and couldn't find an answer. Can we write off any of our day care expenses against taxes from last year? We didn't per-allocate any money from wages last year. Our son was born in March & we spent approx. $3K in day care last year. We have pre-allocated from wages for this year ($5,000) so that's awesome but wondering if there is any way to write off any of it now when doing taxes for 2013? We are infertile and going through IVF and a refund would be very helpful in helping pay for treatment at $16K a pop! Thanks so much for any input you ladies may have!!!

QueSrah · February 2014

Sure. I usually leave Turbo Tax to DH, but I vaguely remember there is a place to account for daycare expenses that you didn't offset through a spending account.

djm31012 · February 2014

Yup you can write it off

vvvvvfee · February 2014

yes- you can take the child and dependent care tax credit (here's a link to the actual tax form). this is what we did for the year DS was born. for the next year we set up a dependent care account like mentioned-- the tax savings is generally better with that.

Deardra77 · February 2014

This is awesome thanks ladies!!!! Do you know if it can be deducted if you use the standard deduction? Or is it only if you itemize?

CarrieB. · February 2014

I think you have to itemize, but not sure. If you do turbotax, it will ask about daycare expenses.

Save all your medical expense receipts if you are doing IVF this year. We were OOP for IVF and my DH had several eye surgeries the same year and we qualified for the medical deduction that year.

shannm · February 2014

K3am said:
I think it also depends on your income - we made too much money to qualify according to Turbo Tax.</blockquote

This.
Yes, you can claim up to a certain amount which is dictated by your total income.

Mustardseed2007 · February 2014

You can claim up to a certain amount depending on income, but I don't think you have to itemize b/c it's a credit, not a deduction.

jess9802 · February 2014

We took the child and dependent care tax credit for 2013. You can claim up to $3000 of childcare expenses, and the credit is a percentage of that amount based on your income. We ended up getting a $600 credit. Participating in a pre-tax flexible spending account (which we are also doing this year) is generally a much better deal in terms of tax savings because it reduces your taxable income.

jf198400 · February 2014

jess9802 said:
We took the child and dependent care tax credit for 2013. You can claim up to $3000 of childcare expenses, and the credit is a percentage of that amount based on your income. We ended up getting a $600 credit. Participating in a pre-tax flexible spending account (which we are also doing this year) is generally a much better deal in terms of tax savings because it reduces your taxable income.

If you eventually have 2 LOs you can put the $5000 in Pretax dependent care account and then claim another $1000 for the credit (b/c it's max of $6000 per family). Turbotax makes it all really easy.